Ten years ago, a Montessori enthusiast named Ray Girn had a grand vision. He wanted to bring high-quality, child-focused education to as many babies and toddlers as possible. He aimed to do this with a chain of for-profit schools. To realize this dream, he was raising $335 million in funding from investors, including venture capital and private equity firms.
For a time Girn's schools, operating under the 'Guidepost Montessori' brand, appeared to be quite successful, with 150 branches serving tens of thousands of children. However, in the background, an astronomical loss of 440 million dollars had accumulated. Parent company Higher Ground Education filed for bankruptcy in June 2025, abruptly closing nearly 60 of its schools.
WERE THE SCHOOLS MANAGED TOO BADLY?
In Oregon, parents received an email one Sunday afternoon informing them that their school effectively no longer existed. A father in Wisconsin went to school to drop off his 5-month-old son and saw that the doors were closed. A mother in California learned that the branch her children attended was sold and that the Montessori curriculum would be replaced by artificial intelligence. Teachers and parents; He began sharing allegations of neglect and mistreatment in Facebook and Reddit groups. These negligences became more meaningful as it became clear how poorly the company was managed.
The Guidepost story was quite shocking. Rebecca Winthrop, Director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, summed up the situation by saying, "Schools sometimes close, but usually not in such large numbers and all at once."
So what could have caused such a collapse?
SOME BRANCHES WERE LOSSING 50,000 DOLLARS PER MONTH
More than 20 former teachers, administrators and company employees expressed deep concern about the company's business model. Seven of them independently identified the situation as a pyramid system. Alex Richardson, who teaches at Guidepost's first school in California, said, "We called it 'Montessori Ponzi Scheme' among ourselves."
The Ponzi system is a fraudulent fraud method in which payments are made to previous participants with the money of people who join the system later, without producing any real profit or investment.
When Higher Ground opened new schools, it often received large advances from property owners to improve the properties. As long as the company continued to grow, things appeared to be going well from the outside. But when it came time to repay landlords and growth was no longer an option, the company collapsed. Recently, some branches were losing $50,000 a month.
THE COUPLE DENIES THE CLAIMS
Rayn Girn and his wife Rebecca Girm firmly reject the Ponzi comparisons and say they are proud of what they have built.
Girn's school administration history didn't actually begin with Guidepost. Born in Canada, Girn started working at LePort Montessori school in Orange County in 2003, while he was a psychology and philosophy student at the University of Toronto. The school was founded by Peter LePort, a wealthy surgeon who was on the board of the Ayn Rand Institute.
Girn had no formal training in education but ran a Rand-focused club on campus. This was enough for LePort and he hired him to help establish a new elementary school.
Girn is committed to the Montessori method, which encourages children to direct their own lessons. He became CEO of LePort in 2009 and dreamed of turning the company into a national chain. But it was much more focused on growth than founder LePort's goals. As a result of these disagreements, he was dismissed in 2016.
He immediately decided to establish a chain of schools that he could control. He and his wife founded Higher Ground, attracting some of LePort's corporate staff and parents. One of these parents was Greg Mauro from Learn Capital, a company known for supporting education initiatives. Starting with initial investments, the company reached 27 schools in three years.
VISIBLE ELEGANCE AND NEGLIGENCE IN THE BACKGROUND
The schools were designed very carefully. The white-walled classrooms were outfitted with cute, child-sized furniture made of light wood. Rayn Girn was a talented marketer; It promised parents the rigor of a high-end preschool education with the long hours of a commercial nursery.
But signs quickly emerged that the company was trying to do too much too soon. They expanded to Hong Kong and China in 2019. Running a nursery was a very costly business; Buildings had to be rented and renovated, materials had to be purchased and expert staff had to be employed. It was legally required to maintain teacher-child ratios in younger age groups, and the salaries of expert teachers with Montessori training were quite high.
Higher Ground established its own training program (Prepared Montessorian Institute) to reduce costs. In this way, they aimed to hire people without a diploma and train them with online courses.
As a result, while parents thought their children were receiving Montessori education, they were actually being educated by inexperienced people. An assistant teacher, who was hired for $19.50 an hour in 2019, explained that on his first day, he was left to supervise the classroom of children between the ages of 2.5 and 5, even though he had no experience.
PANDEMIC PRESSURE AND GROWTH TRAP
Despite savings in classrooms, it took time for new schools to turn a profit. To secure financing, Higher Ground received hundreds of thousands of dollars in advances (tenant improvement funds) from property owners when signing the lease. This system enabled the school to survive on the landlord's money even if it made a loss for two years, with the promise of paying higher rent in the third year.
However, this plan could only work when schools reached full capacity. When the pandemic hit in 2020, the company was already at a loss of $55 million. Instead of closing weak locations and downsizing, Girn opted to open more schools to maintain cash flow from property owners. While the company opened 33 new schools in 2020 and 21 in a short year, the loss jumped to $ 154.6 million.
After the pandemic, labor costs increased, investors began to complain about expenses, and losses reached $364.8 million by the end of 2023. The company began offering parents huge discounts on upfront payments. At one branch, there was even a raffle for a trip to Paris for parents who paid $75,000 in advance.
LEGAL LIMITS WERE VIOLATED
This entire financial crisis had a direct impact on classes. Legal teacher-child ratios have been violated in many states. There were days when a branch in Colorado had just three employees to care for more than 100 children. Cases were reported in Arizona where babies' diapers were not changed due to understaffing, where a teacher stepped on a baby and lied to the family, and in California where a child truant from school and wandered into a Walmart parking lot. By 2023, 15% of families were withdrawing their children from school within the first 90 days.
BANKRUPTCY PREPARES THE INEVITABLE END
By 2024, the agreements with property owners have expired. In August 2024, Higher Ground stopped paying rent at all its schools. Some property owners changed the locks, some filed lawsuits. In February 2025, the Girn couple resigned and the company declared bankruptcy in June with $611 million in unpaid rent debt.
Later, more than 80 schools were sold to a new structure called 'Guidepost Global Education'. This new structure partnered with an initiative called '2 Hour Learning' and transitioned to the 'Alpha School' system, where children are mainly educated with artificial intelligence. When parents were informed that the Montessori curriculum would be replaced by artificial intelligence, hundreds of families who did not accept this new $50,000-a-year model withdrew their children from school.
The problems did not end in schools that were not closed. At a branch in Brooklyn, teachers were filmed yelling at children, while another teacher left a 3-year-old child in the park. Some schools that survived after bankruptcy continued to close suddenly as of 2026.
"WE WILL RETURN TO SAVE THE WORLD"
Despite all the devastation, Ray Girn argues that the critics are wrong. He states that child care is a serious need and that he sees this as a "victory" for bringing Montessori education to thousands of children.
Just a few months after leaving Higher Ground, the Girns purchased land in the Texas Hill Country and opened a new five-room schoolhouse. The annual fee of this new school, which they call 'Fulcrum', is 23,000 dollars and they develop the curriculum themselves. While his wife Rebecca states that he does not want to grow any further, Ray Girn smiles and gives his message about the future:
"We will come back. We have a world to save."
