Every Montessori school loses a cohort of families at five. The public place is free, kindergarten feels like a natural boundary, and the child has ‘done preschool’. It is the most understandable decision in early education and frequently the most expensive one.
What the three-year cycle actually is
A Montessori classroom spans roughly three years of age on purpose. Year one is largely absorption: the child is the youngest, watching older children do things they cannot yet do. Year two is consolidation. Year three is when the child becomes the oldest in the room — the one others ask, the one who demonstrates, the one working most abstractly.
Leaving after year two
You have paid for two years of investment and left before the return. The child who spent two years watching older children never gets the year of being one. In academic terms, much of the abstraction that the concrete materials were preparing happens in that third year — reading fluently, writing at length, four-digit operations, fractions, geometry.
What being the oldest does
Being the person who knows how does more for a five-year-old’s confidence than any certificate. Explaining a material to a three-year-old requires understanding it twice over. This is not a side effect of mixed ages; it is the point of them.
And then what?
At most Montessori schools near here, nothing — they stop at kindergarten, and the question answers itself. Mills continues through fifth grade, which turns the kindergarten year from an exit into a step.