LiberatED Podcast

What is the LiberatED Podcast and who should listen? Check out this quick trailer to learn more!

Today's guest is Lizette Valles, a longtime teacher and school librarian who founded Ellemercito Academy in 2021 as a microschool focused on experiential learning and trauma-informed approaches to education. She is also the founder of Compass Educators, an educational services center that began as a holistic tutoring program but expanded to offer more services driven by parent demand, including support for navigating school choice policies, and support for "road schooling" and "worldschooling" families.

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Bob Luddy is a successful entrepreneur who founded CaptiveAire Systems, the nation's leading manufacturer of commercial kitchen ventilation systems, and later became an education entrepreneur, founding Thales Academy in 2007.

Thales Academy is a classically-focused network of low-cost, PreK-12 private schools that has seen extraordinary growth from starting as a microschool with 30 students in a temporary spot in the back of Luddy's corporate office to now serving over 6,100 students across 13 locations in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Thales was recently named a semi-finalist for the prestigious Yass Prize for education innovation.

Entrepreneurial Life: The Path from Startup to Market Leader, by Robert Luddy

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Rachel Goff taught in the New York City public schools for 16 years. She was growing increasingly disillusioned by what she was seeing unfold in the conventional classroom and finally decided to leave and launch Creative Space Learning Center in 2021, after choosing homeschooling for her own children. Creative Space is a learning center for PreK- 8th grade homeschooled children in Long Beach, New York, on the south shore of Long Island, that follows a child-led learning philosophy.

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Felicia Rattray decided to launch Permission To Succeed Academy in the summer of 2020 after schools shut down due to the pandemic and the shift to remote schooling gave her an up-close look at her nephew's classroom. A longtime public school teacher, Felicia realized how far behind he was academically and created her microschool to help students like her nephew with a more personalized, mastery-based, culturally relevant curriculum. The first year of opening she had 6 students. Now, she has 60 in-person learners and 7 teachers.

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Kenneth Mims is the founder of Science Prep Academy in Phoenix, a private STEM microschool for neurodivergent students in grades 6th-12th. Ken founded Science Prep in 2017 after working for several years with autistic students in Arizona. Last fall, Science Prep was awarded the $1 million "Ducey Prize" funded by Janine Yass, founder of The Yass Prize, to enable the school to open at least five more schools in the Phoenix area and increase capacity to 800 students in new schools throughout the country. Ken is also the founder of the Neurodiversity Education Research Center which helps to support neurodivergent students as they prepare to enter the workforce in STEM-related fields. Science Prep Academy is a program of this research center.

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Holler Creek School of Appalachian Ecology is a small, private K-5 school located in Carroll County, Virginia, just below the Blue Ridge Parkway. Its two founders are Aaron Sebens and Melanie Schrage, both experienced educators who wanted to create a school that embraces what they call "radical rural education." They launched Holler Creek in the fall of 2021.

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Pastor Joshua Robertson is the Senior Pastor of The Rock Church of Harrisburg, PA and CEO and founder of Black Pastors United for Education. Through his role, he has spearheaded a variety of community initiatives aimed at education and youth empowerment, including establishing church-based learning centers for local young people who are enrolled in one of Pennsylvania's virtual charter schools.

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Josh Pickel grew up in Canton, Illinois and returned home to teach at the public schools he had once attended. As time went on, he felt increasingly unsettled about the coercive classroom dynamics characteristic of conventional schooling.

Josh began researching alternative education models and came across Liberated Learners, a network of self-directed learning centers for teenagers modeled after North Star, a learning center in western Massachusetts that was started in 1996 by Ken Danford, who was also a disillusioned public school teacher.

Last summer, Josh quit his teaching job to open Canton Learning Collaborative, a self-directed microschool for homeschoolers. It grew from 5 learners last fall to 15 young people over the course of its first year.

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Today's episode covers three interesting and intersecting topics: unschooling, careers in the trades, and barriers to youth apprenticeships and employment. My guests are Wendy Zanders and her 16-year-old son, Keyshon, a certified welder with dreams of someday running his own business.

Related article: Loosening Youth Employment Regulations Empowers Teens

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