Fox tried to communicate with the school, urging changes and more personalization, but she found the teachers and administrators to be unresponsive. “They were unbendingly focused on their programs and agenda for fifth graders that they weren’t willing to accommodate for meeting him where he was mentally,” said Fox, who has a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education and served for over 20 years in the U.S. Air Force and Air Force Reserve.  

She began to look for other educational options for Gavin, and his younger brother Gabriel, a second-grader. When she discovered , a K-12 microschool launched in 2022 by former public school teacher Hannah Holguin, Fox knew it was the perfect place for her children. “When I walked in, the environment — the spirit — was just so peaceful and happy,” she recalled. Fox pulled her children out of their private school in December, and immediately enrolled them in Masterpiece Academy, where they are technically considered homeschoolers but attend the onsite, half-day program five days a week, surrounded by peers and taught by experienced educators.

Fox is among a growing number of parents who decide to switch their children’s school midyear, something that is becoming easier to do as microschools and related learning models become more widespread. Unlike many traditional private schools — which typically have set admissions and enrollment cycles, lengthy application processes and hefty tuition price tags — today’s emerging schooling models are usually low-cost, flexible and highly personalized. They often have rolling admissions, with students able to enroll throughout the year — which I write about extensively in my latest book.

In states with generous school-choice policies that allow a portion of state-allocated education funding to follow families to their preferred learning environments, students can attend these innovative schools for free or with reduced tuition. That’s the case for most of the students enrolled at , a K-12 microschool in Wendell, North Carolina. It was founded in 2024 by Lisa Swinson, a longtime public school teacher who was working at the state Department of Public Instruction when she decided to become an education entrepreneur. “As I was helping people across the state, I knew that I needed to come back home to help local families because I was starting to hear a lot of conversations about people just needing something different,” said Swinson.

She was accepted into the , a one-year paid fellowship to support promising founders launching new schools, with a commitment to serving low-income students. Swinson’s school has grown from 10 students last year to 34 students today, along with three full-time teachers and an instructional assistant. 

Creative Minds is a licensed private school with a full-time tuition of $7,600. Ninety percent of Swinson’s families attend with free or reduced tuition using the state’s Opportunity Scholarships, a school-choice program that became universal in 2023, enabling all North Carolina K-12 students to be eligible for private school vouchers. The remaining 10% of Creative Minds students are homeschoolers who attend the microschool three days a week at an annual tuition of $4,900, or full-time students whose parents pay full tuition out of pocket. 

Swinson says that more families in her area are looking for alternatives to conventional schooling—both public and private. She welcomed seven new students to Creative Minds this month. “What I hear from parents is that we provide individualized instruction to their students. 

“We individualize everything, from choosing electives, to how they go about learning, to what curriculum to use. Everything is very personalized,” said Swinson, who uses nationally-normed standardized tests to determine a student’s skill level upon enrollment, and then customizes a learning plan based on the child’s needs and interests.

Microschool founders across the US are reporting midyear enrollment boosts, as families switch from conventional schools toward smaller, more personalized learning environments. At in Sarasota, Florida, founder Justine Wilson enrolled five new students this month, bringing her total K-12 enrollment to 70 students. She says that 97% of her students attend her program tuition-free using Florida’s school-choice programs, which became universal in 2023.

Even in states without robust private school choice programs, microschool founders are reporting midyear enrollment boosts. At the , a middle school microschool in Las Vegas, co-founder Christina Threeton welcomed several new students this January, as did Amanda Lucas, founder of in New Jersey.

Tom Arnett, a senior fellow at the Christensen Institute, has why families are attracted to microschools or similar learning models. “Our research shows that many families who switch schools are driven by the reality that school has become a persistently negative experience for their child,” said Arnett, citing a variety of reasons from bullying to boredom. “We also see many families who haven’t switched yet but are actively considering it. Microschools often resonate with these families because they offer a more human-scale environment that reduces friction rather than asking children to endure it.”

If parents and caregivers are dissatisfied with their child’s current school, they don’t need to wait until next year to make a change. The growth of microschooling, alongside the expansion of school-choice policies in many states, makes creative schooling options more abundant and accessible — enabling families to find the learning environment that is the best fit for their kids. 

For Kara Fox in Nebraska, the midyear school-switch has been positive for her boys. “It’s much better because they have been able to just relax and be themselves,” she said. Fox encourages more families to consider changing schools sooner than later if they aren’t happy. “I wouldn’t wait. I would just do it. It’s so worth it because it’s your kids,” she said.

Although she had a doctorate in educational leadership and extensive teaching experience, she quickly discovered that passion and pedagogical expertise were necessary but insufficient ingredients of her new school vision. As it turns out, the business side of running a school – from securing facilities to establishing a sustainable financial model – presented hurdles she hadn’t anticipated. 

Among microschool founders, Wallace’s story isn’t unique. They face the same startup challenges as small business entrepreneurs – facilities procurement, building and zoning regulations, not to mention standing up payroll and other administrative tasks. The difference is that most small business entrepreneurs benefit from volumes of self-help guides, experts and influencers. Perhaps most importantly, they have access to guidance and counseling from both banks and federal small business development centers. 

Most microschool founders simply don’t.

For traditional lenders like banks, a new, small school is simply too risky and the return too small to justify the effort necessary to qualify the applicant and underwrite the loan. Their processes are designed for larger, more established ventures, and it can cost just as much to underwrite a $10K loan as a $500K loan.

Earlier this year, our nonprofit launched the nation’s first open-access loan program for microschools. The idea was simple: offer relatively small, low-interest loans of $5,000 to $50,000 for each entrepreneur to provide the helping hand these small schools need to get up and running. 

In the first 30 days, the program attracted interest from 258 schools across 36 states. The demand was overwhelming. But what we learned while reviewing the applications might surprise you: Of the 54 schools that ultimately submitted full applications, 80% didn’t even meet underwriting criteria to qualify for the unsecured loans we offer. In those instances, we shared specific denial reasons with each applicant and connected them to technical assistance, depending on whether they’re for-profit or nonprofit organizations.

The mismatch between the significant interest in the loan program and the lack of financial and accounting acumen signaled to us that this critical, burgeoning sector needs much more focused support than we had thought. Here were some of their biggest barriers:

•  Business Fundamentals Gap: Most founders excel at education but struggle with basic business operations. In reviewing applications, we found consistent problems with financial planning: unrealistic budgets, inadequate pricing strategies and poor accounting practices. Many resort to personal credit cards or retirement savings to fund operations, a practice that threatens both personal and school finances. Our analysis shows that even experienced educators often lack the business-modeling skills needed to build sustainable institutions.
• Building Code and Zoning Challenges: Finding appropriate, affordable space remains a major hurdle. While many founders eye church facilities as a solution, they quickly encounter complex zoning restrictions – Sunday school rooms rarely meet weekday classroom requirements. The regulatory maze includes building codes, occupancy limits and safety requirements that can overwhelm new founders. Some states are developing solutions, including public-private partnerships and revised zoning laws that could ease these barriers.
•  Sustainability: Early financial missteps, particularly around facilities and debt, can create nearly insurmountable challenges for growth. Schools operating with high debt loads or unfavorable leases struggle to achieve the scale needed for stability. What’s missing is the kind of technical support that traditional small businesses receive — guidance on financial planning, facility management and operational efficiency that could help these innovative educators build lasting institutions. 

For founders like Wallace, the Microschool Loan Program offers more than just capital: It provides a pathway to establish proper facilities and implement sustainable business practices while maintaining focus on their core mission of transforming education. With the loan, she has a strong start, serving her initial 17 students who need alternative learning environments.

The challenges that microschools are facing are so intimately related to the hurdles charters faced in the early days of that sector: There’s so much energy, so many important ideas and so many dedicated and enthusiastic people. But many lack good business fundamentals. We must help ensure people do things the right way so they are positioned to launch successfully and flourish.

The next three to five years will be monumentally important in cementing this sector. This grand experiment — supporting microschool startups — shows the importance of building scalable, sector-wide support for nontraditional school models. There is a critical need here, and we can, in fact, help solve their biggest challenges.

Abby had been since birth. She and her siblings were granted the freedom to chart their own educational pathways as self-directed homeschoolers and, more recently, as students at the , an alternative private school in Framingham, Massachusetts, that since 1968 has embraced noncoercive, democratic education with no curriculum, tests, grades, or homework. It has inspired the growth of dozens of Sudbury-model schools around the world.

No, I told her. Traditional schooling, with its standardized curriculum and testing mandates, is not an option. 

After all, I had spent the previous several months crisscrossing the country visiting founders of emerging schools and similar models, such as microschools, learning pods, and homeschooling collaboratives. The majority of these founders were former public school teachers who felt that their creativity and autonomy were stifled within a conventional classroom. They left to build something different. Parents left, too. Frustrated by frequent testing and a one-size-fits-all curriculum, the parents I interviewed pulled their children out of traditional schools and enrolled them in these alternative ones because they wanted more freedom and flexibility in education. 

No, I wasn’t going to allow Abby to give up that freedom.  

Gratefully, for her and me, I soon realized my error: If educational freedom is truly my top value, then Abby deserves the freedom to choose the educational option that is right for her. We all deserve that freedom.

Students, parents, and teachers today have more K-12 education options than ever and they are increasingly able to find the best fit. For Abby, our traditional public high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is undoubtedly right for her. It is clear to me now that this is where she belongs, while my other children currently have no interest in attending a conventional school. When my ninth grader joined the other 2,000 high schoolers earlier this month, she quickly felt at home in the large, bustling environment with access to hundreds of clubs and activities, a wide assortment of academic offerings, a talented team of educators and a breathtakingly diverse group of fellow students from across our city. She loves it.

But for some children and teens, a traditional school may not be the best fit. They may be lost in large schools, feeling either held back or left behind by a curriculum meant for the masses. Others may confront bullying or feel unsafe in a conventional classroom. Some may struggle with anxiety and depression, or have special learning needs, and desire a smaller, more personalized learning environment. Some kids might just want a change. Now, there are many more of these personalized learning environments to choose from, and they are more accessible than ever.

in Arizona is an example. One of the dozens of innovative schools I spotlight in my book, it was founded in 2021 by Tamara Becker. She was a public school teacher and administrator for nearly 30 years who became attracted to microschools during the COVID pandemic due to their small size, individualized curriculum, and focus on each child’s academic growth and emotional wellbeing. “Microschools are the wave of the future because they provide an environment focused on the child, not the system,” said Becker, who runs one of Adamo’s microschools out of her home in Queen Creek, a suburb of Phoenix.

Adamo currently enrolls more than 70 K-8 learners across multiple locations, who are all taught by certified teachers, including Becker. One-third of her students are neurodiverse or have special learning needs ranging from dyslexia and dysgraphia to ADHD and autism. Her students have grown both academically and socio-emotionally since joining Adamo, and all of them attend the microschool using the state’s education savings account (ESA) program. Becker ensures the tuition is fully covered by the ESA program, so that no parent has to pay out of pocket.

In 2022, Arizona became the first state to enact a school choice policy enabling every K-12 student in the state to be eligible to access a portion of state-allocated education funding to use toward a variety of approved educational expenses, including microschools like Adamo. More than a dozen states have since followed Arizona’s lead.

Microschools and other creative schooling options are spreading quickly in states like Arizona where students can often attend tuition-free, but they are appearing all across the country as more families look for low-cost, highly-individualized alternatives to traditional schools — both public and private.

More students today are able to enjoy an educational environment that is right for them. For Abby, that is shifting from homeschooling and alternative education to a traditional public school. For others, it could be the opposite. As parents, we should look at our children’s distinct educational needs and interests, and say “yes” when they want a change.

McDonald predicted that even a few weeks of displacement from school for millions of kids could fundamentally change education. 

And while most kids would eventually return to school once the epidemic faded, she wrote, “some parents may discover that learning outside of schooling benefited their children and strengthened their family.” They might begin to consider homeschooling or other alternatives as a longer-term option. “They may realize that education without schooling is not a crisis but an opportunity.”

Five years later, it seems, something fundamental has changed: As many as 125,000 microschools now operate nationwide, according to the National Microschooling Center, and several states now support homeschooling and microschooling with public funds.

McDonald, a Massachusetts mother of four, frequent contributor to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, host of the and the author of a about self-directed education and alternatives to traditional schooling, set out to capture what the movement looks like now in her new book, . It’s out Tuesday.

She charts an ideologically diverse group of parents and teachers who are striking out on their own to essentially start small education businesses. The common thread, she finds, is a “desire to bring to education the level of personalization that we increasingly enjoy in all other parts of our lives.”

McDonald talked to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Greg Toppo recently about the book and the microschooling movement.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Âé¶čŸ«Æ·: I wanted to start with this quote in your book from a Kansas mom who launched a microschool. She says, “The fringe is becoming the cloth.” That’s quite a statement, quite a realignment, if true. Do you agree that that’s what’s happening?

I’ve been covering unconventional education — homeschooling and microschooling — for over a decade now. This movement really began prior to 2020, and at the time I thought that we would continue to see slow but steady growth in homeschooling and alternative education more generally. But I always thought it would stay in the margins.

When COVID hit in 2020 and there was that massive educational upheaval, it enabled families to start to think more creatively about education options, to maybe look more openly at homeschooling and microschools and other ways of approaching teaching and learning. And many families liked what they saw. Some families even built these new alternatives. Since 2020, we’re really seeing a much more mainstream push towards alternative education.

I think it’s fair to call these folks disruptors. 

Peaceful disruptors. 

But I wonder if we’re getting ahead of ourselves to start calling it mainstream. I mean, there are still in public schools.

If you look at some of the data in Arizona, for example, so many families are of traditional district schools. Obviously, charter schools would be their primary alternative at the moment, but certainly with the expansion of school choice programs and universal programs in places like Arizona, you’re seeing more and more families realize that they have other options, and they’re able to find schools and spaces that are aligned with their values and viewpoints in ways that they haven’t before.

We have to give it a little bit of time, because we need to let these entrepreneurs do their work. As more and more entrepreneurship takes hold, we’ll see more options for families, and families will be able to find just what they’re looking for.

I want to define just who you write about in this book, because it’s a really specific kind of person. As you say, they’re people who “built what they couldn’t find.” You’ve got folks who start religious microschools, Montessori microschools …

LGBTQ+ microschools, Afrocentric microschools …

You talk to folks like , who opens this in Massachusetts, and it’s interesting that he’s in the mix because he blanches at the “coercive qualities” of traditional schooling, even the compulsion to attend at all. That’s a pretty broad coalition. And I wonder: What do these folks have in common?

It is a broad coalition. What’s so exciting about this current decentralized, entrepreneur-driven educational moment, is that it’s extremely diverse. There are founders of every demographic and ideological persuasion, and different motivations for creating programs, whether it’s that they can’t find what they’re looking for for their own children and they want to create something better, or they just think that there’s a different way of approaching education. 

I think about Tamara Becker, the founder of in Arizona. Her microschool, which now has 73 students across several locations — she didn’t build that for her children. She doesn’t have children, but was a long-time public school teacher and administrator, and just felt that COVID provided this moment to individualize education and move away from a one-size-fits-all learning model into something more relevant and personalized for the 21st century. That’s the common thread among these entrepreneurial parents and teachers, that desire to bring to education the level of personalization that we increasingly enjoy in all other parts of our lives.

The other common thread, and why the book is titled Joyful Learning, is that despite the tremendous diversity of these models — from secular, progressive microschools to conservative, faith-based, microschools, and different educational philosophies and approaches, from classical to Montessori to unschooling and everything in between — these programs are places where children are happy to be learning. I saw that as I crisscrossed the country and interviewed the founders and families on my podcast and interviews related to the book. That was a very apparent characteristic of all of these spaces: Children are happy to be there. They are often sad when snow days hit or when summer vacation approaches. 

As you were going through this list of different kinds of schools and all these founders, I wondered, “How did you find all these folks?” Obviously, you have this podcast. Were they coming to you? Were you going to them?

Great question. I’ve been in the alternative education movement for a long time. I wrote my 2019 book, Unschooled, which is where I first connected with people like Ken Danford. So I have, thankfully, a rich network of folks in the alternative education world and in homeschooling that crosses political and ideological lines. In many cases, folks have come to me. 

Then, of course, COVID hit, and there was more and more interest in alternative education. In early 2022 I decided to launch my LiberatED podcast, because I wanted a multimedia approach to storytelling beyond the articles I was writing, and was able to connect with many of these founders there. For the most part, founders have come to me. I’ve been able to visit many of these founders, either by reaching out to them because they’ve been on my podcast or featured in articles, or by them inviting me to come. I also have done a lot of collaboration with the [a group of entrepreneurs supporting alternative learning models] that’s now supporting over 4,000 of these innovative educators across the country.

My work now is just sort of an extension of the work that I’ve been doing in alternative education for over a decade.

As much as anything, this book is an instruction manual for future founders and, I guess, for policymakers as well.

And parents.

What are you hoping readers come away with in terms of real instruction?

The book is primarily geared towards founders and families. Obviously, I’d love it if policymakers read it as well, and members of the media like yourself who are curious about this movement. But it’s primarily a book for parents and founders of programs. And there’s often a lot of overlap between those two groups. A lot of the founders that I talked to had no intention of becoming education entrepreneurs, or opening a school or a microschool or learning pod, and either because of COVID and the disruption caused by that, or just being unable to find exactly what they were looking for for their own children, ended up making that leap into entrepreneurship. In most cases, they found the experience to be incredibly rewarding. 

The majority of the founders are former public school teachers who were disillusioned with the standardization and test-driven learning environment that they found in conventional schools. Many of these teachers found their own creativity and autonomy stifled within a conventional classroom and wanted somewhere where they could be free to educate the way they felt was most effective and beneficial to the students they’re serving.

There’s got to be a very steep learning curve for the parents who are not trained teachers, and I wonder if you saw that in your reporting. Did you see parents struggling to make school come alive?

Most of the founders in the book are former teachers. Some of them became homeschooling moms after being public school teachers and then opened homeschooling collaboratives. I think about Alicia Wright in Richmond, Va., who runs . She was a longtime public school teacher-turned-homeschooling-mom-turned-founder. So there’s also that trajectory. A lot of these founders who are parents and who launch programs are highly successful in their own right.

I think about Sharon Massinelli, who runs in Georgia, a physician associate as well as a long-time homeschooling mom who has balanced work and homeschooling for years. She was really attracted to a hybrid homeschool model that enables part-time enrollment off-site with trained educators working through a curriculum for half the week, and then the other half students are at home working through that same curriculum with their parents. That has been a model that’s been around since the 1990s and continues to gain popularity, especially over the last five years. She was able to create her own hybrid school after her children had been attending another hybrid school program that was far away and not quite what she wanted. She was able to use that model and create something new. 

That’s what we see with many of the entrepreneurial parents who may not have a background in education but are incredibly successful in their own professions. Now, they have so many resources to help them launch and grow their programs, largely because of the network effects from more and more of these programs existing. You have these microschool startup programs like or that really work with these everyday entrepreneurs to create successful, sustainable programs.

I want to be sure to address this issue, which a lot of people coming to your book might be wondering about: This idea that the choice movement itself is not as simple as just joy and entrepreneurialism. There are a lot of people who feel like it’s a play to undermine public schools, and I wonder how you approach that.

What we’re seeing now is the expansion of choice, variety and abundance in education that we enjoy in so many other parts of our lives, but that we haven’t had much of in education because it’s been largely dominated by traditional public schools. It’s a good thing that we see more options for families, more ways of approaching education beyond a conventional classroom. It’s no surprise that more families are gravitating to and and outdoor learning environments, because they want something that’s much more play-based, that’s much more learner-centered, and that’s much less restrictive and standardized than a conventional classroom. That’s a key piece of this: We see so much innovation in the 21st century in so many other segments of society, while K-12 education has largely been standardized and stagnant.

For folks who might not know about you, it’s fair to say you lived this. During the pandemic, your oldest set off on her own to do distance learning, and you enrolled your younger three in the private . Talk a little bit about your experience — right in the middle, by the way, of doing the reporting for all this.

My kids were unschooled, homeschooled since birth — never attended a conventional classroom. They were attending a microschool a couple of days a week when COVID hit and the microschool shut down. All of the classes that they were taking throughout the city were shut down for months in many cases, more than a year in some.

I write in Joyful Learning about how at one point I realized that all of this education disruption that I was documenting among other families was hitting my family as well, and we were making education changes as a result, including, as you say, my older daughter, Molly, who had always been homeschooled. She began taking online classes and then ended up enrolling in a full suite of high school online classes through while remaining legally a homeschooler in Massachusetts. She’s since graduated and is off to college. Next Saturday she moves in. And then the younger three enrolled in the Sudbury Valley School, which I had written about extensively in my Unschooled book and always really adored, but it’s far away from us, and also is a state-recognized private school. We were comfortable with homeschooling, but changes among our education ecosystem during that time of disruption led us to pursue other options, and they were thrilled to join Sudbury Valley.

Do you envision us ever going back to the way things were before COVID? And how do you think this movement is going to change the system itself?

Do I think we’re going to go back to the way it was before COVID? No, and my answer is related to your second question. What we’re seeing is a much greater focus around decentralized, choice-enabled, entrepreneur-driven education that’s responsive to the needs and wants of parents in local communities. One of the things I talk about in the book is the contrast between the education disruption and reform that happened in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which, of course, we’re coming up to the 20th anniversary later this month and what we’ve seen in terms of education reform and change in the wake of COVID. 

After Hurricane Katrina, the change largely came from the top. It was the state of Louisiana that took over the New Orleans Public School district to orchestrate change from the top, albeit with the goal of eventually returning New Orleans schools to local control, which would take more than a decade to accomplish. By contrast, the educational change that we’ve seen since COVID is the opposite. It’s an entirely bottom-up, decentralized movement of entrepreneurial parents and teachers creating the kinds of schools and spaces that enable young people to flourish and be happy. 

When tragedy struck, we suddenly needed something more: flexibility and understanding. We found that at an alternative hybrid school.

Our mother had Type 1 diabetes during our whole life, but in our junior year of high school it got worse. She needed around-the-clock help, including support from us. We tried to make it work for the first two years, but it just got to be too much. Plus our minds were in a different place. We weren’t interested in dances and socializing. We were always thinking about our mother. We were dealing with bigger problems than what to wear to school. We looked into online programs for school and picked (CCAA), a hybrid alternative school that was available through our school district.

We were able to set our own pace and had the flexibility to meet our school obligations while focusing on taking care of our mother. We were able to make our own decisions about our school/life balance. Our teachers at CCAA were understanding when we had to leave school early, and they offered the support we needed to get us through the times when our mother’s illness meant we had to put school on the back burner.

We had to be mature. We didn’t go to school to play and hang out, but to get work done. We were responsible for our own success and finally had a structure that allowed us to manage that responsibility on our own terms, along with plenty of personal support. Wendy Thompson, former district director at CCAA, checked on us every week. If there was something we couldn’t do, she would help us or find someone who could. Just her constant presence and caring about our schoolwork and our personal well-being filled a void and helped us not feel so adrift. She helped us fill out college applications and sorted out a plan for how we would start a career and get the training we needed. 

Miss Wendy also helped us pursue our college plans once we graduated. After our mom died, we were at a loss for how to move on to that next chapter; the idea of working and running a home and tackling college at the same time was just too much. Miss Wendy called us every day for a week and asked “What’s wrong? What can we do to make this easier?” She helped us realize we could still pursue our dreams in the medical field.

Today we’re both medical assistants. We went through a training program at Northwest Career College and earned medical assistant licenses and phlebotomy certifications in nine months. Now we are pursuing bachelors of science degrees in nursing through a different hybrid program at Grand Canyon University. All the prerequisite courses are offered online and then students complete their clinical work at the school’s hospital in Henderson, Nevada.

We wish more high school students knew that there are alternatives to traditional high school. A hybrid school like what we did in high school and now in college is a great option. There are some young people who need the social interaction an in-person environment offers, but there are also a lot of us who face challenges or who just want something different.

It takes a lot of strength and drive to persevere through challenges, and we were fortunate to have each other to lean on as well as lots of adults who helped us along the way. We needed each other to push us forward, and we needed supportive adults who trusted us enough to follow our own school pathway on our own terms. 

We have benefitted so much from an alternative pathway through school to a career that we’ve aspired to for years. We want to make sure other students are aware of alternatives that will allow them to focus on their families while meeting their own expectations, so they can achieve their dreams no matter what happens, too.

Nearly 15% of school-age children in the Meade School District — 504 students — are enrolled in alternative instruction instead of attending a state-accredited private or public school.

Because state funding is partially based on enrollment, those children would bring roughly $3.5 million in funding to the district if they attended a public school.

That’s money that could cover staff salaries and resources, maintenance and repair of school buildings or extracurriculars, said Heath Larson, executive director of Associated School Boards of South Dakota.

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Lynka Guadalupe was about a year and a half from graduating from one of Boston’s oldest high schools when she learned she was pregnant. 

She liked life as a student and at first she thought she could juggle pregnancy and schoolwork. She soon realized, however, that navigating the large campus was a lot more work than she’d expected. 

“I was just drained in general,” she recalled, with “a lot of floors for me to be going up and down.”

But the final straw came when she confided in a trusted staff member, who told her that if she kept the baby she’d be ruining her life.

Guadalupe dropped out and spent months figuring out her next move. That’s when she learned about a tiny charter school not far from her home called , or BDEA. Though its model has changed slightly over the years — the school no longer operates in the evening, as its 20-year-old name implies — it has become one of the most alternative high schools in the U.S., offering a model of care and personal attention that larger, more comprehensive schools often struggle to create.

For Guadalupe, that meant a program that let her take classes from home two days each week. School administrators worked around her childcare schedule for the other three.

“They’re like, ‘As long as you get the work done, that should be the most important thing,’” she said. “They know where I’m at 
. They don’t treat me like I’m ‘less than.’”

Though it was a long process, Guadalupe graduated in June with her now-4-year-old in tow, one of more than 1,200 young people who have found an alternative path to graduation since BDEA opened in 2004. 

The school comprises three programs, which enroll about 250 students ages 16 to 23. 

It offers streamlined coursework that can be completed faster than in most schools, part of a competency-based curriculum that allows students to quickly show they’ve mastered material. 

Among its keys to success: a nearly obsessive attention to the mental, physical and academic needs of students. BDEA not only offers small classes and free meals but showers, laundry, clothing, free city bus passes and an in-school health clinic. It helps students earn work permits and find jobs. For those experiencing homelessness, it works with a local nonprofit to find housing.

“If I didn’t have the support,” said Guadalupe, now 23, “I think I’d probably still be dropped out and just working my life away with no diploma.”

The support comes mostly in the form of small but important details. BDEA starts its school day at 9 a.m., hours later than most high schools. It also offers a session at 10 a.m.

“That’s our most attended time,” said Alison Hramiec, BDEA’s head of school and a longtime teacher there. The later start time, she said, allows students to drop off siblings or offspring at daycare or other schools. Most of her students take public transportation, which typically takes more than an hour. 

Class calendars are compressed to allow students to complete more at a faster clip. And the entire system is based on mastery, allowing students to test out of courses so they can check off requirements in days rather than months. The typical student graduates in just under three years.

But the school imposes no time limits on graduation, allowing them to take as little as one course per trimester.

‘My phone number hasn’t changed in 24 years’

Originally serving students who’d dropped out to become “third shift” workers, punching a time clock from midnight to 8 a.m., BDEA’s original class schedule allowed students to leave work, sleep through the afternoon and attend evening classes before their next shift. 

But over time, most young people grabbed afternoon shifts, creating a need for a more robust morning program. It also deepened its relationship to graduates, many of whom take extra time to decide on college or a career.

”We’re reaching out to those students on a regular basis and saying, ‘I know you’re working as a cashier right now at CVS, but what do you think in September you really might like to be doing?” said Director of Postgraduate Planning Margaret Samp.

She began working as a literacy specialist at BDEA at its founding, 24 years ago. Her background was in drama and English as a Second Language, and she admitted that she loves her current title “because it sounds like everybody’s going to graduate school.”

Even graduates who return years later needing help with college or career dreams aren’t turned away. As if illustrating BDEA’s consistency in students’ lives, she added, “My phone number hasn’t changed in 24 years.”

From credo to memoir

One month each year, most classes stop and students work on projects based on the competencies they need to meet.

Teachers are also encouraged to collaborate. In one case, humanities teacher Jose Capo Jr. and biology teacher Nilo Ashraf created a course that used superheroes to teach about DNA. The pair challenged students to imagine what would happen if two superheroes reproduced, asking what powers the offspring would share with their parents.

He called the class “a creative writing/science class hybrid” that helps them see how their interests intersect with academics. 

“It’s really about young people feeling empowered to take charge of their lives here,” he said.

Capo often starts his courses by asking students to write a credo. Many struggle with the assignment, telling him, “‘I don’t think I have one. I’m just here.’ 
 And I’m like, ‘Isn’t that still a code?’ And they would just be like 
” — he makes a “mind blown” motion with his fingers.

After their credo, Capo guides them through the process of writing a short memoir while reading a sociology textbook that explores “the multiple dimensions of the self.” He also assigns chapters from the 1967 memoir Down These Mean Streets by , a Latino writer who grew up poor in New York’s Spanish Harlem. 

Students write essays exploring which dimension of the self has a stronger hold on them at the moment — and which they need help bringing into the light.

Hramiec, the head of school, said that sets BDEA apart. “We spend a lot of time giving students space to grow emotionally, to learn how to self-regulate, to think about social intelligence.” 

Jill Kantrowitz, the school’s advancement director, recalled sitting in on the superheroes unit in her first few months at the school. “It blew my mind,” she said. “The idea is that students can take control of their education.”

That extends to nearly every aspect of the school, from feedback on classes to student achievement. Rather than pushing to pass each class, Kantrowitz noted, students can choose whether they want to simply prove competency or aim for a higher level of mastery. 

That changes the complexion of classes, where 15 students might be working towards different outcomes.

Students are, of course, expected to attend every day, but many face huge challenges. About one in 10 is homeless, with many “couch surfing” and in search of housing, said social worker Rachel Revis. “We have students that sleep in parks. We do have students that are in shelters looking for stability. And that was a huge thing, especially after COVID, where families were sort of broken apart.”

On the other hand, BDEA also serves escapees from elite schools who can’t handle the competitive pressure. “They would say they come here because they’re like, ‘I can actually breathe — I can be myself.’”

‘An educational team backing me’

Nearly half of students arrive with either individualized education plans (IEPs) or less restrictive 504 accommodation requirements. And nearly all face difficult family and personal circumstances.

Teachers watch absences closely, calling and texting whenever students don’t show up. There’s no harsh punishment for not attending, but if they miss five days in a row, the school turns off their city bus pass and turns to more direct interventions, such as one-on-one meetings, home visits and, if applicable, conversations with family members.

That approach is rare, said Mina Koenig, 22. She enrolled at BDEA after attending the prestigious for a few years. Chronic migraines drove her out of a school that she says didn’t accommodate her needs — for one thing, its ubiquitous fluorescent lights never shut off.

Though she earned A’s, Koenig missed a lot of school — one year, she was absent 160 days and failed several classes.

She expects to graduate from BDEA within a year as she earns more math and science credits. 

Much like her classmate Guadalupe, Koenig said one previous roadblock was having a physical condition that severely limited her, with teachers “making no real effort to cross that barrier and understand,” despite an IEP.

At BDEA, she said, teachers are “very focused on having an individual connection with each and every one of their students” — very similar to her medical team of doctors and neurologists. “Here, I feel 
 that I have an educational team backing me.”

For her part, Koenig said her migraines have been improving. After she graduates, she’s thinking about studying to be a dietitian. She plans to attend Bunker Hill Community College and “figure it out while I’m there.”

BDEA has already given her the freedom to study diet and nutrition, offering a gardening project as well as botany and agriculture courses. “It’s really nice that the school is supporting me with things that are other than just math worksheets,” she said. “They’ve actually set me up for life.” 

During my freshman year, I attended three different schools, all of which had one thing in common — none were a welcoming environment, from the students, teachers and administrators alike. 

Eventually, I found a school that had what the others were missing: LEAD Charter School in Newark, New Jersey. My time there helped prepare me for my budding career in the health care field, but it shouldn’t have taken as long as it did to find a school like that. I’m not the first person who didn’t feel supported by a traditional high school approach and I won’t be the last. The rigid environment and policies that schools too often adhere to affect students like me — students that felt unheard and, as a result, had a hard time succeeding.

The persistence of this issue pushes some students to drop out. Although I didn’t drop out, many students like me have experienced pushout, when within the learning environment lead to youth disconnection from school. This can include situations in which teachers and staff don’t reflect the student body and an over-reliance on zero-tolerance discipline policies that push students out of school. 

I have experienced the weight of pushout. At one of my former high schools, I got into a fight that I did not incite, which resulted in a one-month suspension. During that time, I didn’t receive any learning materials. No homework. No classwork. Not even a study guide. I was failing nearly all of my classes. What made matters worse was the other two girls that fought me only received a two-week suspension. 

I felt unwelcomed and misunderstood from all sides, including the administrators. I remember clearly having to fight to keep my water with me when I was sick while the administrators pestered me to get rid of it. The no-food or drink rule only worked in theory since they played favorites and allowed certain students to keep their food and drinks. The administrators made school much harder for me than it should have been through encounters like this. 

My experiences at my previous schools are perfect examples of what doesn’t work and what makes school difficult for students. One of the several other ways my former high schools made things difficult for me was by withholding the knowledge of my academic progress. Up until I enrolled at LEAD, I didn’t know my GPA or how many credits I had. I was just going to school and going home, unaware of where I stood academically. 

Meanwhile, in the classroom, I felt as though the curriculum wasn’t relevant or applicable to the real world. Instead of pushing me to excel, they were pushing me farther and farther away from the finish line — graduation.

My experience at LEAD, however, was a complete 180 from my experience at my other high schools. The staff, students and teachers supported me both academically and non-academically. The curriculum is built for students that are looking to enter the workforce and start a career. It was at LEAD where I explored my interest in health care and earned my Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) certification. 

When other schools pushed me aside, LEAD was the school that lent me a helping hand and guided me onto my current path, a path toward earning my home health aide (HHA) certification and working in the health care industry. 

More schools should incorporate these principles and create educational environments that respond to all students — their futures depend on it. A good place to start is by hiring diverse staff that represent the student body and altering school discipline policies. Diversifying staff in schools would help break down barriers between staff and students and help them better understand students’ backgrounds and experiences. This would help combat the unwelcoming environment within schools and lessen the negative interactions students have with staff. 

The same can be said for school discipline policies. Reframing schools’ perspective on student behavior through investment in alternatives, such as mental health counseling and more student-centered practices, will help eliminate the issues that would require suspension or expulsion.

School discipline policies, staff diversity and social alienation could be addressed through the passage of pending state legislation that would create an Office of Dropout Prevention and Reengagement. The office would dedicate its efforts to understanding young people like me who are pushed to the edge of disconnection as well as my peers who have fully disconnected from school. It would be responsible for developing and helping school districts use strategies to combat these triggers for disconnection. This would give students like me all over the state the conditions for learning that are needed in order to succeed in the classroom and in life.

No one should be suspended for a month or feel targeted at their school. Although that is a part of my story, it shouldn’t and doesn’t have to be that way for others. You can act now to encourage your legislator to support the bill and make them aware of how important the issue of dropout prevention is to the state. If we are successful, there will be a place in our schools for every New Jersey student — no matter who they are.

On Dec. 1, four young people from Newark, Trenton and Camden who are part of the NJ Opportunity Youth Coalition testified before the state Senate Education Committee in support of , which passed and was referred to the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee. A companion is making its way through the state Assembly.

At Black Mothers Forum, our mission is to end the school-to-prison pipeline by focusing on young Black boys in grades K-8 who were subjected to harmful exclusionary discipline in their local schools in and around Phoenix. At Eight Million Stories in Houston, we re-engage older youth who are no longer enrolled in school and, in many cases, have become involved in the judicial system. 

While our models differ in many ways, they are similar in that they are rooted in care, connection and affirmation, which in order to learn. We provide full-time learning settings outside of traditional schools where students feel like they matter. While schools often suspend students for various behaviors, our programs do not exclude, but use strategies to keep students in school. And we’re seeing results in learning, graduation rates and employment. At a time when so many, including the U.S. secretary of education, are calling for a in American education, our examples offer important lessons for all schools. 

Our students can engage in learning because we have repositioned adults from directing and correcting roles to supporting and affirming. At Black Mothers Forum, we hire learning guides who are mothers, teachers and community members from the same backgrounds as our students and who view them as “their own.” Under their guidance, younger and older students come together each day in a common area where everyone checks in to gauge well-being. It gives them a chance to express themselves. It’s personal. It’s like family. Our guides also use the curriculum as a starting point for more personal, engaging activities like one-on-one support, student-led conversations and enrichment that draw on our community’s rich resources. Guides also adjust daily routines to fit what students need.

This ethos of care and affirmation also guides our approach to behavior. For example, when children can’t manage themselves, instead of punishment, they get a hug. We do discipline by connecting, then redirecting. These strategies have led to learning gains. In February, we noted that students were significantly behind grade levels, so we focused on reading comprehension, recognizing that kids who cannot make meaning of what they are reading have trouble executing math and science problems as well. By June, we saw significant improvement in our students, some increasing one or two grade levels.

At Eight Million Stories, we are working with the most vulnerable, disengaged youth whom traditional schools have pushed out. We match adults to each student and start each day with a one-on-one check-in. We don’t send students away if they aren’t ready to learn when they get here. Rather, we recognize their challenges. We talk about their coursework and how to navigate upcoming court dates, job demands and financial, family and housing issues. We set up job training and enrichment — things that can overwhelm a counselor at a traditional school. 

This has also meant adopting flexible schedules that work around students’ needs. To help them get their diplomas, we create personalized learning plans with academic instruction for GED programming in the morning and optional supplemental tutoring and interventions in the afternoons — when their work schedules allow it. We don’t keep the kids here all day, forcing them to choose between school and work. The goal is to be as responsive as we can to students’ needs to help them develop the tools they need to succeed as adults — education credentials, job skills, stability and a sense of purpose and self-worth. 

In our programs, we want our kids to know every day that they’re loved, that people care about them and want them to be successful. At Black Mothers Forum, we’ve seen significant changes in our children, even in a few months. For example, one young boy who was often suspended or sent out of the classroom at his traditional school is now able to focus and learn here with us. Students feel supported. They feel loved and respected. When kids feel that way and know they’re not going to be penalized, they can relax, be themselves and learn. Similarly, at Eight Million Stories, so many kids have turned their lives around — and data show we’ve made an impact. Over our three years in operation, 54% of our students are now employed, 40% have completed their GED, 8% are pursuing postsecondary education and only 3% experienced recidivism.  

Creating learning experiences that enable all young people to thrive means a shift in stance from “We’ve always done it this way” to “Why do we have to?” All students need to feel cared about and to know they are a priority. We think our designs and those of some of the other promising models featured in a from the nonprofit organization about community-led learning demonstrate what’s possible for schools. They also demonstrate how the most powerful changes can be imagined by those closest to the challenge.