Joanne Defilipp Alex '76 has dedicated her life to nurturing pre-school children and building communities in and around Old Town, Maine, where she founded the Stillwater Montessori School 15 years ago with her husband, Joseph Alex '75. When she went to what she thought was a routine staff meeting last fall, her former students, some now in college, led the standing ovation to congratulate her on being named Maine's Teacher of the Year for 1998.     Alex became the first early childhood educator, the first teacher from an independent school and the first Montessori educator to receive the Maine award, which put her in the running for this year's National Teacher of the Year award. Beyond the nurturing qualities that make her a natural classroom teacher, she was cited for taking a leadership role in education beyond her own school. Her insights and abilities get disseminated through her work with the early childhood program at the University of Maine and through contact with parent and community groups. "Whenever people are around her they really understand the value of education," said William Primmerman, who runs the teacher-of-the-year program for Maine's Department of Education.     An art history major, Alex finished her degree requirements at Colby with a senior-year Jan Plan she spent as a student teacher in the Montessori school in Waterville. She liked it so well that she arranged to spend the spring semester of her senior year there as a full-time assistant teacher. That cemented her interest in early childhood education as a career, and she got a job the following year teaching kindergarten in Mexico, Maine, her hometown. Alex replaced the woman who had been her kindergarten teacher and spent her first year as a teacher in the same classroom where Alex had been a kindergartner almost 20 years before.     After taking formal Montessori training in Mississippi, she and Joe returned to Maine and opened the Stillwater Montessori School in 1983. Joe has been the school administrator and Joanne has taught one of the early childhood classes of children age two and a half to six. The school has grown to include a staff of nine handling 72 children in four classrooms.     Photographs of Alex that ran in Maine newspapers when she got the Teacher of the Year award look little different from her college yearbook photo. "I'm always working with two-and-a-half to six year olds and they never seem to change or grow older from year to year, so why should I?" she said.     Last fall, a couple of themes in Alex's life came full circle, and she found herself back at Colby, where as a student she had worked in the Colby Nursery School and where she and Joe were married. In October Joanne and Joe attended Parents Weekend with their oldest child, Jessica '01. Two weeks later they were back in Cotter Union for the official Teacher of the Year recognition ceremony. While that honor and several other prestigious awards in recent years are nice, she said, it's the children she has taught and the communities she has helped build that are most gratifying. "If you do it well, it really pays off that way," she said.