"We feel truly blessed to become part of the Ave Maria community." That's what Freedom Institute CEO Christopher Marker said standing inside a converted bank building on Pope John Paul II Boulevard on August 20, at a ribbon-cutting for the town's newest high school. It's a small line, but it points at something bigger than one campus opening. For most of its history, Ave Maria has been described in the future tense: what it will have at build-out, how many residences are planned, what the retail count will eventually reach. This fall, for the first time, a chunk of that future tense turned into present tense, and it happened inside three weeks.
If you live here, you already felt the shift without naming it. Two schools opened. A restaurant lineup that used to be a handful of storefronts around Annunciation Circle now runs deep enough that residents own most of it. And the Saturday rhythm that disappears every spring is about to come back. None of these are separate stories. They're the same story, told through three different pieces of daily life catching up to what this town has been promising residents since Tom Monaghan funded the Oratory back in 2007.
Two Schools, Three Weeks Apart
Collier County Public Schools opened Ave Maria Elementary on July 30, the town's first on-site public school. Before that date, public school families here sent their kids elsewhere, because there wasn't an on-site public option to send them to. Principal Beverly Budzynski, who has lived in Ave Maria since 2021 and brings more than 40 years in education to the role, is now running a school inside the community she already calls home rather than commuting to lead one somewhere else.
Three weeks later, on August 20, Freedom Ave Maria held its grand opening, a second campus for the Freedom Institute, whose first location is in Naples. The 10,000-plus-square-foot high school sits in the old First Foundation Bank building overlooking the Town Center and serves grades 9 through 12. It opened this fall with 40 to 60 students and is projected to grow to 120 within three years, backed in part by a $1 million matching grant from the Dekko Foundation and a partnership with Barron Collier Companies. The model pairs each student with a Success Coach, a certified Florida teacher who also handles academic planning and college prep, and layers in dual enrollment so students can leave with college credit already banked.
Put those two dates next to each other and the pattern is obvious. Before this summer, a family in Ave Maria choosing a school had three real options: Ave Maria Catholic Academy's K-12 private program, the town's homeschooling community, or a drive out of town. Now there's a public elementary school and a second private high school format, both operating inside the same town for the first time. That's not a marginal addition. That's the town closing a gap it had carried since its founding, the gap between "self-sustaining town" as a marketing phrase and a town where you can actually raise a kid from kindergarten through senior year without leaving the zip code.
The Businesses Grew Up the Same Way
The school timeline isn't an isolated data point. It's the same growth pattern that built out Ave Maria's business scene, just on a different clock. More than 75 shops, services, and restaurants in Ave Maria are now owned and operated by residents, not outside chains parachuted in. Chef Jason Cao runs Umami Ave, a Southeast Asian fusion spot that had its grand opening in February. His brother-in-law Danny Dang owns Ave Nails, and in 2025 partnered with his sibling Binh to open a second salon, AM Nails, both in town. Their kids attend Ave Maria Catholic Academy. Dang's daughter Kayla studies at Ave Maria University. Three businesses, one extended family, all living inside the loop they also work in.
Phong Ho, another longtime resident, owns three storefronts in the Town Center: Tropical Smoothie Cafe, which he opened years before most of the rest of this list existed, Vicky Bakery for Cuban pastries, and OASIS The Kitchen Lounge. Allan Garcia opened Blue Agave, a modernized take on Mexican food built around family recipes, and Oil Well Craft Beer is approaching its tenth year in business, an actual milestone in a town that only opened its doors in 2007. None of this is the story of a developer filling retail pads to hit a leasing target. It's the story of the same families who moved here for the schools and the lifestyle deciding to open businesses instead of commuting to one, which is a different kind of commitment than a strip mall tenant signs.
Saturday Mornings Come Back
Every spring, the Ave Maria Farmers Market goes dark, and every fall it comes back to the Town Center for a season that historically runs from early November through late April. Last season drew more than 50 vendors selling produce, citrus, honey, baked goods, and handmade crafts, with live music starting at 11 each Saturday morning. That's a meaningful jump from the market's earlier years, when vendor counts sat closer to 20 to 25. The growth tracks the same curve as everything else here: more residents, more local producers and makers with something to sell them, more reason for a Saturday morning market to justify itself as a fixture instead of a novelty.
For a lot of households, the market is where the town's calendar actually resets each fall. It's the first Saturday families run into neighbors they haven't seen since spring, the first weekend the Town Center feels crowded again after a slow summer, and this year it lands on the same calendar page as two new schools finding their first-week rhythm.
The Calendar Fills In Around the Schools
Fall in Ave Maria isn't just the market and the classrooms. The Naples Balloon Festival lands at the Collier County Fairgrounds, which sits inside Ave Maria's town limits, on October 24, drawing visitors from well outside the community into a facility residents pass every day. A Christmas Crawl Around the World typically follows in late November, timed to the market's early weeks.
That's the on-ramp. Once the calendar turns to January, the Town Center picks up Trolley Tours on a weekly schedule through mid-spring, followed by Taste of Ave and the Blues, Brews & BBQ festival, one of the more heavily attended events in this part of Southwest Florida with live bands, food trucks, and a car show layered on top of the beer garden. None of these events exist because a developer scheduled them to hit an amenities checklist. They exist because enough people live here now that a festival calendar has an audience to draw from, which is a different foundation than the trolley tours and model home walk-throughs that used to make up most of the town's public programming a decade ago.
What This Adds Up To
Ave Maria was built on a premise: a self-sustaining town with its own schools, shopping, and community life, planned in advance of the population that would eventually fill it. For most of the last two decades, that premise ran ahead of the reality on the ground. This fall is the first stretch where the reality caught up. Two schools opened inside three weeks. A restaurant scene owned by the people who live above and around it crossed 75 storefronts. A Saturday market that started with a couple dozen vendors now needs more than fifty to keep up with demand. None of these are separate wins. They're the same town closing the distance between what it promised and what it actually delivers to the people already living inside it.
If you're already calling Ave Maria home and you're curious what this kind of growth means for your street, your resale value, or your next move within the community, Jennifer Rosenwald knows this town from the inside and welcomes the conversation. Let's connect.
