Alief Montessori Community School is a pre-kindergarten through fifth grade school following Montessori philosophy. Students are typically between 3 and 12 years old. The school is located on 6th Street in the historic townsite of Alief. As of July 2011, the school is undergoing an expansion. Groundbreaking on the expansion was held on March 26, 2010. In 2011, Children at Risk, an education advocacy non-profit, ranked the Alief Montessori among the ten best Houston-area elementary schools. The school has been recognized as an "exemplary school" by the Texas Education Agency every academic year since 1999 and was a recipient of the Honor Roll School Award from the Texas Business and Education Coalition. Its 2011 per-pupil spending of $3,587 was one of the lowest in Houston.