A bilingual, international school in Rincón where children learn to question, build, and lead, through real projects, two languages, and an island that is the classroom.
Academia Montemar is a new bilingual, international school on the coastline of Rincón, Puerto Rico. We open with our earliest grades, K–5 in Fall 2027, and grow with our students year by year.
Our goal is to grow resilient, open-minded leaders who can successfully navigate and contribute to a dynamically changing world.
We teach students to stay with hard questions instead of reaching for fast answers, build real things, learn in two languages, and care for the ocean, the land, and the wild places they call home.
For 150 years, schools trained children to become reliable workers who could follow instructions and complete the task in front of them. The world our children are entering is changing faster than that, and it is more connected across cultures and borders than any generation before them. We believe the children who will thrive are the ones who can adapt as the world shifts beneath them.
The elementary years are when children form their relationship with learning itself — whether it feels like wonder or obligation. We intend to make it wonder.
That wonder isn't the opposite of rigor. We believe kids thrive when standards are high. Children rise to meet a high bar, especially when they're doing hard things alongside their friends and surrounded by the support to succeed.
High standards, high support is the environment every belief below is built to create.
Every child arrives curious, and our job is to keep it alive and give it room to grow. We help children hold ideas firmly enough to defend them and lightly enough to change their minds: to ask questions, stay open, follow the evidence where it leads, and genuinely consider perspectives different from their own. Critical reasoning isn't reserved for high school: the instinct is already there in the earliest years, and we build on it from the start.
Agency means making your own choices and living with what follows. We give kids a real voice and real responsibility, including real turns being the expert. We want them to set goals that actually scare them a little — the kind of healthy risk that comes with attempting something hard and getting there. That's one of the most formative experiences of childhood.
We believe learning can flourish outdoors as often as in: knee-deep in a tide pool, planting in a garden, tracking what returns to shore after a storm. Puerto Rico's reefs, coastline, history, and people are not a backdrop, they are core curriculum. Alongside this, we teach using real-world projects to cultivate important life skills: public speaking, entrepreneurship, theater, art, financial literacy, and civility. As an international school rooted in Rincón, we treat deep local roots and genuine global fluency as two halves of the same education. We believe that children who know where they come from are better equipped to decide where they are going.
The primary years are a critical window for developing tenacity, creativity, and the joy of figuring things out. We believe children can do hard things, bigger and harder than most schools ever ask. When a child is wrestling with a hard problem, our instinct is not to rescue them. It is to sit beside them and trust that they are stronger than the struggle.
We believe that having fun is the best competitive advantage there is. The highest achievers, whether athletes or artists or teachers, tend to share something: they care deeply, and they understand that failure is a key part of success. Wholehearted effort is often the greatest source of joy, and we build a culture where trying hard is celebrated and enthusiasm is contagious.
Some of the most demanding skills a child ever learns are the human ones: to manage your own feelings, to sense what others are feeling, and to reach out to the child at the edge of the circle. We teach children to treat disagreement as a gift to the group rather than a threat, and to see that tending to one another is often how a group moves forward stronger. That care turns outward into contribution: we nurture children whose first instinct is to ask what they can make or improve — a product they invent and sell, water sampled for the reef, a problem in town they help solve. We teach them to build more than they take, start local, and carry that instinct anywhere they go.
After forty years founding and leading schools across six countries, Dr. Maldonado is helping build his fifth where he began: at home in Puerto Rico. He leads a school governed by a volunteer board of local parents and neighbors.
Meet the teamWe are building a school that reflects the community of Rincón. Academia Montemar is committed to welcoming children from a range of backgrounds and to making a Montemar education accessible to families across our community.
We plan to use a sliding-scale tuition model, so families across the economic spectrum can be part of Montemar. Families seeking need-based assistance would go through a confidential process to determine their tuition. We also expect merit scholarships and support for families with more than one child to be part of the picture. Our goal is to keep the school financially healthy while welcoming children from a real range of backgrounds.
Academia Montemar opens for the 2027–2028 school year, and we're welcoming our first families in Rincón now. We'd love to tell you more about the school and how your child might belong here.
Request informationFamilies, neighbors, teachers.
