LiberatED Podcast

Nestled at the end of a residential cul-de-sac in Hopewell, Virginia is Dream Tech Academy, a microschool founded by former public school teacher, Danette Buckley. Dream Tech Academy launched in 2019 with four children, including three of Danette's own, as a homeschooling and tutoring program. It is now a recognized K-12 private school with about 30 children and four hired educators and is located in an inviting single family home just outside of Richmond that Danette purchased exclusively for her school.

Read Kerry's Forbes article featuring Danette and her microschool.

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Matt Dreier and Kristen Braia are the cofounders of a new Acton Academy affiliate microschool, Pace Academy, in North Chesterfield, Virginia, about 10 miles outside of Richmond.

Matt retired from a 20-year career in the US Marine Corps and began pursuing his interest in education. He earned a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and then teamed up with his niece, Kristen, a mom and successful entrepreneur, to launch their microschool.

When Pace Academy opens this fall, it will join approximately 300 other microschools in the fast-growing Acton Academy network, and will be one of six Acton affiliate microschools in Virginia.

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Kimberly Stringer is the founder of Kreative Kids Academy in Wichita, Kansas, a child-led, outdoor-based licensed preschool that during the pandemic response and school shutdowns expanded to include a school-age program that continues to grow and flourish. I had the chance to meet Kim and visit Kreative Kids and was so taken by its beauty, warmth, joyfulness, and emphasis on the value of abundant outdoor time for children.

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Cecile Enright is the founder of River's Edge Academy Charter School (REACH), which she launched in 2011 with 70 students in a leased church space in rural Rogue River, Oregon. Today, the school serves over 200 students in two locations.

REACH is a K-12 hybrid charter school, enabling students to be on campus for part of the week and to learn from home or in the community for the remainder of the week, often taking enrichment classes in areas such as art, music, and 4-H with local community partners. As a charter school, REACH students attend tuition-free.

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When schools shut down in 2020, Detroit mom Danna Guzman joined countless parents across the US who created "pandemic pods" to enable their children to continue learning together during school shutdowns. Mounting enthusiasm for her learning pod led Danna to expand it into an established microschool for homeschoolers that continues to grow and flourish today.

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Maysaa Bazna haș been involved in education and alternative education for many years. She earned her doctorate in curriculum and teaching at Columbia University, and was a professor in Columbia's Teachers College and the City University of New York (CUNY). She has taught in the areas of learning disabilities, disability studies, and inclusive education.

Maysaa is currently the Director of Professional Practice and Community Partnerships at the School of Education, Queens College, CUNY.

In 2010, looking to create the kind of hands-on, self-directed educational experience she wanted for her child, she launched Pono, an outdoor, democratic education co-learning community in New York City. She continues to serve in an advisory role for Pono while also expanding her passion for outdoor education by partnering with the New York City public schools.

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Today's guest is Ariel Maguire, an accountant and mom of 4 who lives in a rural area of the Big Island of Hawaii. In early 2022, she and a group of local moms got together to create Kulike Learning Garden, a Waldorf-inspired microschool structured as a Private Membership Association, or PMA, to help with the care and education of their children in an area with severe child care shortages. They hired an experienced teacher and were successfully operating the program for about a year until state regulators shut them down, and fined Ariel $5,000, for running an "unlicensed" school.

Local Hawaii news coverage of Ariel's story.

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"A lot of families started realizing things weren't working in the conventional system," said Syreeta Farria, a homeschooling mother of two children in Detroit who, along with another homeschooling mother, Victoria Washington, runs a weekly homeschooling program for local families. Farria has seen the growth in homeschooling over the past three years, particularly among families of color. "There are a lot of stereotypes about what homeschoolers look like. And quite often, most people do not see moms like myself and Victoria. They do not see that there are Black and brown families in urban areas that are moving away from traditional learning and deciding to do homeschooling or non-traditional methods when it comes to educating their children."

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Cara Frantz is a certified professional midwife who never planned to launch a microschool until the school closures and education disruption of 2020 led her to create Envision Homeschool Collective for her children, their friends, and members of the community. Envision Homeschool Collective consists of two microschools, one for high schoolers on her property and the other for middle schoolers just a mile down the road, with three hired educators. Prompted by local demand, Cara intends to expand her microschools over the coming months.

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Ben Kestner and Lisa Pavlock are experienced educators who taught in both public and private schools in the US and internationally before leaving conventional education in 2013 in search of something different. They moved to Montana with their young daughter and founded a Sudbury-inspired, democratic school on a Native American reservation.

In 2021, they moved to Ibiza in Spain to help lead The Learning Project in Ibiza, a new Sudbury-model, democratic school focused on non-coercive, self-directed learning.

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