Linda Davis

Linda Kay Davis was born July 26, 1951, in East St. Louis, Ill. to Rev. William Morgan Davis and Martha Griffin Davis. Complications from Parkinson’s Disease led to her death on September 6, 2025, in Springfield.

Linda was a much older sister to three boys, and while the grownup Linda had a wide acquaintance from four continents she found no adult more interesting than a child. At 18 she turned her back on college back East and took a job helping emotionally disturbed children under the late Dr. Ugo Formigoni, who pointed her toward Montessori practice. While working she earned degrees in child psychology and development from the future University of Illinois-Springfield.

She was defiant in the face of the Parkinson’s that killed her. When she was diagnosed in 1999 someone asked, “What will you do now?” She replied, “Live my life.” Which she did, exuberantly. If no teaching opportunity was at hand she made her own. At the age of 26 she founded Springfield’s Montessori Children’s House, which still thrives. In the 1990s Alcuin Montessori School in oak Park/River Forest lacked a program for early adolescents so she created one; that led to her playing a crucial early role in the development of Montessori’s ideas for adolescent learning, her later program at Prairie Crossing in Lake County being recognized nationally.

Across five decades Linda founded schools, taught in schools, advised schools, and ran schools in Springfield and the Chicago suburbs, in Portland, Oregon, and the Bay Area of California. She was as comfortable as a club comic in front of a packed room at conference talks and seminars. She authored journal articles and was a busy consultant, most recently at a Chicago Public Schools Montessori magnet school on that city’s west side.

Linda is survived by her brothers Bill, Ron, and Don; and eleven nieces, nephews, great-nieces, and -nephews. She also leaves behind friends old and new, grateful students and colleagues, and faithful companion James Krohe Jr. They, like all who knew her, will miss her.

Those who wish to remember Linda might donate to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.