Nancy Nightingale Schwab
- Published: August 27, 2026
Nancy Nightingale Schwab, 84, passed away peacefully at her home on Aug. 15, 2026, under the care of Ohio’s Hospice. Nancy was predeceased by her husband, Louis Schwab, M.D., and her parents, Barbara Moody Nightingale and Philip L. Nightingale. She is survived by her two sons, Efstathios Potamitis and Martin Schwab; her two grandchildren, Philip and Sophia Potamitis; and her sister, Jeanne Nightingale.
Nancy was co-founder and board chair of Nightingale Montessori, now in a newly renovated building located on a forested permaculture campus at 2525 N. Limestone St., in Springfield, Ohio, former headquarters of Bonded Oil. Over the school’s 48 years, Nancy developed a uniquely successful approach to pre-school reading. Her educational philosophy was impacted by an uncommon set of learning experiences: her childhood in the “green belt” town of Greenhills near Cincinnati; her British schooling in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England; her life as a student in Perugia, Italy; and her work as an art teacher in an inner-city school in Cincinnati.
After earning her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Science degrees at the University of Cincinnati and her Master of Education at Xavier University, she co-founded Nightingale Montessori, Inc. with Sheila Brown, and together they began adapting Maria Montessori’s revolutionary principles of child-centered learning. Over the years, Nancy designed an innovative approach to preschool reading instruction that leverages and empowers the agency of the toddler’s inborn cognitive traits: unflinching curiosity, innate language processing skills, pattern recognition, creative thinking and logical reasoning, neuroplasticity and neurodiversity. (Rote memorization of phonograms may be the child’s weakest trait.) Noting that the phonetic consistency of the Italian language lends itself more readily to Montessori’s theories of early learning than the inconsistent phonemic structure of English, Nancy redesigned the American Montessori method to follow more faithfully Montessori’s original practice, thus replicating the more fluid literacy experience of Italian children. She found that by carefully selecting the “palette” of speech sounds, first in words of phonetic consistency and then to more complex linguistic coding, her students experienced the same “explosion into reading” as did Italian children. With her program, she also noticed a dramatic reduction in dyslexic reading disorders that plague English readers with far more frequency. The sustained success of Nancy’s discoveries propelled her to develop, with her sister, Jeanne Nightingale, Ph.D., a pioneering pre-school literacy program — Sound Shapes Precision PhonicsTM.
In lieu of flowers, the family welcomes contributions to the Nancy Nightingale Schwab Memorial Fund to support the publication and dissemination of her groundbreaking literacy program: https://nightingalemontessori.org/donate. A second option: Contribute to the restoration of the historic Schwab pipe organ: https://cathedralconcertseries.org/schaffer-memorial-music-fund.
A memorial service celebrating Nancy’s life will be held on Thursday, October 15, 6:30 p.m. at Nightingale Montessori, 2525 N. Limestone St., Springfield, OH.
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