LiberatED Podcast

During my recent visit to the flourishing hub of microschools and education entrepreneurship in South Florida, my first stop was at Compass Outreach and Education Center, a microschool run by our guest today, Laurel Suarez.

Suarez was one of the first microschool/hybrid school founders in the greater Fort Lauderdale area, launching her microschool in 2019, and she has become a mentor and source of support and encouragement for many of the other microschool founders who have created or expanded their programs over the past few years.

In South Florida, Microschools Are Reshaping K-12 Education (Forbes.com)

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Tucked inside her beautiful farmhouse on her sprawling farm property in Wichita, Kansas is Jessica Ramsay's cozy classroom where she offers one-on-one tutoring to local children. A longtime teacher in the public schools, Ramsay decided to resign from the district in 2021 to become an education entreprenuer. She opened Farmhouse Phonics, which is now so successful that she is actually earning more money as a tutor than she was as a public school teacher. She is also able to see real, sustained success in helping children in her community to read and gain academic proficiency that they were previously lacking.

Former Public School Teachers Are Earning More As Education Entrepreneurs (Forbes.com)

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Today's podcast guests are Molly and Noah Stephenson. They have experienced the benefit of small-scale, personalized learning first-hand, initially as unschooling parents and now as founders of the Wildflower Community School, a microschool in Wichita, Kansas. Only about 4 out of their current 35 students would be considered neurotypical, with most of their students having specialized learning needs, including autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and so on.

For Neurodiverse Children, Microschools Can Be An Ideal Learning Environment (Forbes.com)

Joe Connor founded Odyssey to help connect families to the available education choice programs in their respective states, ensuring that all eligible families are able to access these choice programs. His work also helps to inspire and activate entrepreneurial parents and teachers who are looking to create new education solutions in their local communities.

This week, Odyssey announced a $4.75 million seed funding round with the prestigious venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz.

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Our guest today created her thriving, award-winning microschool for her own son. He was the catalyst. Like any entrepreneur, especially a "parentpreneur," Iman Alleyne saw a gap and set out to fill it.

She built the Kind Academy microschool located in Coral Springs, Florida, which has received philanthropic support from the VELA Education Fund and has recently been named a semi-finalist for the prestigious million-dollar Yass Prize.

But Iman isn't resting on her laurels. She has big plans for the future and for expanding Kind Academy to many more people and places.

'100 Schools in 10 Years', Award-Winning Microschool Founder Shares Her Vision (Forbes.com)

There is something extraordinarily special happening in South Florida these days. It has become a hub of education entrepreneurship and emerging K-12 learning models, creating increasingly more abundant and diverse education options for families.

I recently had the opportunity to spend several days in the Fort Lauderdale area gathering with these incredible microschool founders. Shiren Rattigan is one of them. She runs Colossal Academy, a beautiful and inviting microschool for middle schoolers. Shiren also does an incredible job of connecting local founders and other education entrepreneurs with each other and with the greater community, sharing resources, hosting gatherings, offering support and encouragement, and really helping to accelerate this entrepreneurial cluster of innovative learning models and schooling alternatives.

Colossal Academy is a VELA Education Fund grant recipient, as are many of the other microschools in the South Florida area. VELA is a non-profit, philanthropic organization that offers grants to education entrepreneurs who are creating non-traditional learning options and other schooling alternatives, including microschools, homeschool collaboratives, learning pods, etc.

The Sudbury Valley School is legendary in alternative education and unschooling circles. Founded in Framingham, Massachusetts in 1968, Sudbury Valley has become a beacon for parents and educators interested in non-coercive, self-directed education, and has inspired the creation of dozens of Sudbury-style schools around the world.

Our guest today is Mimsy Sadofsky, one of the original founders of the Sudbury Valley School who continues to work at the school as a full-time staff member.

This episode is also personally very special because I wanted to share with you our family's journey toward enrolling at Sudbury Valley School.

Episode-related links:

Sudbury Valley School open house

Planning kit for starting a Sudbury model school

Award-winning filmmaker and Sudbury Valley School alumna, Laura Poitras

American Journal of Education research paper on SVS graduate outcomes

Free At Last, by SVS cofounder Daniel Greenberg

Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, by Peter Gray

Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom, by Kerry McDonald

It's been a hope-filled week in West Virginia!

Yesterday, the West Virginia Supreme Court overturned a lower court's ruling against the Hope Scholarship program and lifted the injunction on the scholarship to enable West Virginia families to immediately take advantage of this expansive education choice program—which is the second most comprehensive education savings account (ESA) program in the US, after Arizona's sweeping school choice legislation was passed and upheld this year.

Today's BONUS episode of the podcast features Jamie Buckland of West Virginia Families United for Education (WVFUE), and Katie Switzer of the Monongalia Forest School.

"How One State Went From Bottom to Top in Education Choice and Innovation" (fee.org)

Chris Turner is a tech entrepreneur turned education entrepreneur who founded Moonrise.com as a colearning space for kids in Decatur, Georgia. I first featured Moonrise in my Forbes column last year and was inspired by Chris's vision to bring the Moonrise experience to more communities to help make childhood and parenting more joyful and rewarding.

Chris is building an entirely new of category of education that doesn't fit neatly into existing definitional or regulatory boxes. Encouraging education entrepreneurs like Chris to start and scale their businesses by reducing or eliminating regulatory barriers can go a long way toward expanding access to more diverse, creative education options from which families can choose.

Report: "Encouraging Education Entrepreneurship: State Policy Ideas for Supporting the Creation of Innovative K-12 Learning Models and Schooling Alternatives" (State Policy Network)

I have been really excited to see the bundling of education entrepreneurship and innovation in certain regions of the US. You'll recall that we recently talked about the education entrepreneurship that's sprouting in New Jersey. There is also a flurry of activity in New Hampshire. I will be spending more time in the coming weeks highlighting the stories of education entrepreneurs who are geographically concentrated, which can often lead to ongoing collaboration and network effects that help to sustain these new enterprises and begin to shift the culture toward a greater embrace of education innovation and schooling alternatives.

Today, I am excited to focus again on Nevada and the burgeoning microschool movement there. You'll remember back in May we talked to Ashley and Don Soifer from MicroschoolingNV about the gains in Nevada, and especially in the Las Vegas area. And now I am thrilled to introduce you to Emily Grégoire, a Las Vegas homeschooling mother of 4 and education entrepreneur who founded the Rainbow Room as a part-time, full-day, drop-off program for local homeschoolers.