Casa Familiar expands its services to the community
The Casa Familiar program team is ready to continue transforming human pain into an action plan for happiness.
The Instituto Nueva Escuela (INE), as a nonprofit organization and main promoter of the Montessori Public School Project in Puerto Rico, has a model we call the Triangle of School Transformation.
This model is made up of three components: Montessori pedagogy, the collective, and families. Their integration is necessary to make a school an excellent one, since we understand that promoting only the academic or curricular aspect is not enough. “We had to build that social fabric, we had to change the way schools were governed,” shared our executive director, Jennyffer Otero, in a recent podcast interview, referring to the beginnings of the project in a public school.
From this first public Montessori school, the Casa Familiar program was born, which is why attention to families—and families themselves—were a fundamental part of the beginning of the Montessori Public School Project.
Casa Familiar was created to address the socio-emotional needs of students who returned to the Juan Ponce de León School in Guaynabo after its reopening in the 1990s.
While providing services to students, we also listened to mothers, and that’s how we realized families also needed support.
“Any family that had a problem had to go through the palito,” recalls Ana María García Blanco about Casa Familiar’s beginnings. She mentions that it was families helping families, since the resources available today did not exist back then.
The Casa Familiar team has been trained for this new stage of the program.
Today, Casa Familiar has grown. There are now 14 Casas Familiares that serve students, families, and the community. In 2025, the program is expanding its services to seek the integral well-being of the community—meaning people have what they need physically, emotionally, and mentally to live well.
Services that Casa Familiar will provide include:
Individual and group psychological evaluations and therapy
Psychoeducational workshops on emotional health, nutrition, hygiene, self-care, educational support, among other topics
Support groups for mothers, fathers, caregivers, and youth
Health fairs and educational campaigns
First aid training
Dialogue spaces between families and school staff
Family representatives’ participation in school committees and community activities
The design of Casa Familiar recognizes that integral well-being—physical, emotional, and social—of children, youth, and their families is an essential component of human development and educational success. This vision is framed both within the perspective of health promotion proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and within the principles of Montessori pedagogy, which consider the school as a space for the formation of free, supportive, and responsible human beings committed to peace and social transformation.