About the Founding Family
Denine lives in Newton with her husband and three children. She enjoys gardening, cooking, board games, keeping up with trends in education and spending time with her family. As a mom, Denine has high expectations and high support for her children. Her children attended Montessori preschools, private college preparatory elementary and middle schools, and public high schools. Education is the most important thing to Denine and her family. They moved to Massachusetts in 2015 in search of a larger more diverse school for their older college-bound children.
Denine's oldest daughter went to Newton North High School shortly after moving to Newton. At North, she was a four-term Class President, a defensive specialist for club volleyball and NNHS varsity volleyball team. She was a nationally awarded journalist, a three-year school committee member on the Newton School Committee, and was elected to the Massachusetts Board of Education. She studied abroad in London as a Freshman in College, was Treasurer for the student body at Hamilton University, and works for the career center on campus. Her interest areas include Public Policy, Educational Policy, Finance and Economics, Law and Ethics.
Denine’s 14-year-old daughter played club volleyball, was a journalist for the Day-Time newspaper, a pianist, and loves everything about words and language. Her hobbies include digital art and animation, reading, and paddleboarding.
Denine also has a 3-year-old son who enjoys books, cars, trucks, puzzles, changing lyrics in songs, rhyming and making up funny puns. He has a gift to get anyone to stop what they are doing and read to him.
Henri, Denine's husband was French-educated, speaks 4 languages, leads a technical team at Oracle, enjoys watching movies, reading technical articles, family time, and bike rides to Boston.
Denine started her career as a preschool teacher when she had her first child. She taught in infant, toddler, preschool and preK rooms, but her absolute favorite was teaching in mixed age classes. After Denine’s children started elementary school, she attended to her "big girl career" in healthcare and education software. She founded a sales enablement consulting company that helped large corporations teach their sales teams everything from industry trends to consultative selling techniques. But she couldn’t shake her love for teaching young children. Today, with the birth of her now 3-year-old son, Denine has retired from her sales enablement firm so she can focus 100% of her time on her true passion for teaching and leading young children.
The most important gift we can give our children is access to the highest quality education possible, from the start: an education that is grounded in a nurturing environment, rich with top-notch teacher-child and child-child interactions, with a supportive structure that makes it safe to learn, explore, and make mistakes. Denine wanted to get back into teaching preschoolers but didn’t want to do it like everyone else. Young children learn best through their experiences and relationships. She didn’t want to get back into teaching at a preschool where children are kept in one room all day waiting for new experiences to come to them. Nor did she want to teach in a place where children are assigned to a new teacher every year on their birthday. She wanted a boutique preschool-designed to offer each child an individualized curriculum and unique experience based on their interests and strengths. "Teaching is the most wonderful way I can give back to my community," Denine said. "It was important to me to incorporate our community into each child’s learning experience." Social emotionally, there are countless benefits to a mixed-age setting where each child is able to learn as quickly or slowly as they need while mentoring other children and reflecting on their own growth.
That magical school is finally here, nestled in our Auburndale community. It's a school for the next generation in Newton, where young children have a voice in their education, are inspired to expand on their ideas in responsive learning spaces while being cared for by a loving teacher for all their years in preschool.