By Andrea Santiago Vicente

Julie Figueroa grew up between Vega Alta and Ciales. Her alma mater, as she says, is the Antonio Paoli school in the Santa Rita de Vega Alta urbanization. She attended the elementary years there and lived across the street.

In her childhood she played at being a teacher, and her students were her younger sister and her dolls. From that moment in her heart was the desire to educate, and in her innocence she said that in her Antonio Paoli she would exercise, but today we see that it is a fact.

She arrived at her childhood school, after spending 6 years as a temporary teacher in the country's public education system, the Department of Education (DE).

In 2015, the opportunity arose to make a school change at Antonio Paoli and the two alternatives presented at that time were Bilingual and Montessori. Julie attended both orientations, but Montessori wowed her.

''What motivated me to study Montessori, more than bilingual, is that in Montessori everything was integrated. At the same time it goes to the child specifically. It goes to the needs of each child individually,'' Julie told us, an aspect that she felt she could not work with in traditional education.

This decision made her the first guide of the Antonio Paoli. She started with the Girasol environment, an Early Childhood environment with 28 boys and girls and 28 families who gave this educational method the opportunity.

At that time, Julie's assistant was a mother, Dania Ortíz, a mother who had her two children in the Girasol environment, and whose educational method changed her life.

As Julie says, ''Montessori transforms human beings, touches lives''.

Julie had set herself a goal

In her early years as a Montessori guide, Julie's goal was to make her coworkers fall in love with this method that changed her life.

Every time I had the opportunity I talked to them about how wonderful this methodology was. But Julie wasted no time planning, as teachers do to reach their children. She, with the support of the director and the school secretary at that time, called a faculty meeting.

This meeting was something else. The meeting was at another school, field trip type and took the entire faculty to the Juan Ponce de León Montessori school in Guaynabo, the first public Montessori school.

As she tells us, the visit served for her coworkers to observe the environments, materials, dynamics within the school community and to have a dialogue about the Montessori philosophy and methodology. For her, this exercise helped a lot, because today the Antonio Paoli has three Early Childhood, four Elementary I and two Elementary ll.

For a moment this transformation was threatened, when in 2018 the school was put on the closure list by the previous DE administration, but thanks to the fact that the school community defended its project, in Santa Rita there is hope for our country.

If Julie is asked about her school, she will say that it is a beautiful little school, where the faculty is very united and committed to their children and families.

Julie describes being a Montessori guide as a lifestyle more than a profession, a service and one of respect.

Little Julie is not so little anymore, and today she is a Montessori guide for Early Childhood. She is one of the many Faces that work hard every day, because she knows that School by School a New Puerto Rico is possible.