Meet Our Owners
We have an owner onsite during working hours because, honestly, absentee owners in early childhood education don’t make sense.
Ms. Christina
Ms. Christina is an accidental Montessorian. She was born and raised in Cheyenne, WY where she grew up enjoying the outdoors and participating in community theater and music programs. After spending time at Colorado State University on a music scholarship, she graduated from the University of Wyoming where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Geography with a focus on natural resource management. After an internship with the US Forest Service, she set to earning a law degree. This adventure helped her discover she did not want to be an attorney. While it is an expensive way to come to this conclusion, it is also a good way to avoid any regrets.
She served as the Executive Director of the Pacific Northwest Intergovernmental Audit Forum for the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) in Portland, OR before relocating while pregnant to her husband’s hometown of Houston, TX in mid-2000. It was her search for quality childcare when she was returning to work that led her to Greystone House. After a couple of conversations and a surprise job offer she began working as the morning administrator/chief herder-of-cats in January of 2001 and immediately found an immense source of happiness and fulfillment. After driving up enrollment and building a world class staff, she and her husband purchased The Woodlands school in 2007. In 2020 they purchased the licensing to Greystone House Schools and now oversee the business and brand. They are both passionate about children and Montessori.
Ms. Christina still plays the piano and sings. She has volunteered as a music director in local children’s community theater organizations and enjoys when the weather turns cooler so she can be outside as often as possible. She and her husband have been avid travelers with countless trips throughout the US and abroad over the last 25+ years. She relocated her mother to The Woodlands where she can be close to her.
Ms. Christina has a wonderfully close-knit family that eats together, laughs a lot, and hugs way more often than they deal with any personal dramas. Two of her children are graduates of Greystone House as is her step granddaughter. She is proud of having made so many connections and helped to educate and empower so many children over the last 20+ years. She reflects daily on the privilege of being a part of the lives of so many incredible families besides her own and looks forward to many more years of service.
Mr. Doug
Originally from the Chicago area, Mr. Doug relocated with his family when the oil companies began consolidating operations in Houston at the beginning of the 1970s. He grew up exploring Cypress Creek and the surrounding wooded areas by foot (and occasionally dirt bike), collecting snakes, bugs, and other oddities along the way. He is happy to have been raised with a ton of friends in a time of real human connection, outdoor play, and free exploration.
Mr. Doug pursued spatial sciences and regional planning for his bachelor’s and master’s work, achieving the highest honors in the process. He focused on the economics and planning of urban areas for his PhD work where he eventually grew tired of digging into the tiniest details about optimized transportation system design and federal/state/local funding mixes for projects. At heart he is a math geek and science nerd. He considers himself a lifelong learner and is endlessly curious about many subjects. He is a voracious reader and enjoys digging into new topics prior to making up his mind on a subject (or deciding it really doesn’t matter). He plays with numbers and spatial data for fun.
Mr. Doug ran computer labs while at school and somehow thought it wouldn’t be fun to do as work. He instead worked as a spatial data analyst prior to changing his mind and embarking on an extended career in the tech industry starting during the dot com boom and Y2K idiocy. He has inventions and contributions to technology solutions that enable the remote work that many people do today as well as large scale data storage solutions. He has extensive cloud computing experience and has worked as a partner to many of the world’s largest tech companies as well as flapping his gums at countless industry conferences. His current focus is designing cloud computing platforms.
He has been an avid photographer for more than four decades and enjoys capturing images of wildlife and architecture, but he is happy to pull out lights and create portraits of people who are willing to subject themselves to his rambling thoughts and bad Dad jokes. When not at work he can be seen wandering around the school with a camera looking to capture moments for the newsletter and website. He readily admits that this tends to end in children climbing on him and encouraging him to act like a three-year-old (he tends to oblige this request). Ms. Christina is his favorite person on the planet and a source of endless inspiration to him as well as his best friend of more than a quarter of a century. They have raised 4 children together. Unlike his better half, he cannot get 90+ children to work together happily while guiding their own actions, but he CAN tie his own shoes and pick out his clothes every day.
