They include Tabitha Sue James, whose son has been following an online curriculum at home since 2020. 

“I applied the first day,” she said. “I’ve paid thousands of dollars in property taxes to schools. Why shouldn’t we be able to have … homeschool choice?

While families won’t know until early April whether they have received funding, she could be among the nearly two-thirds of homeschooling families who say they use public dollars to educate their children, according to from the Rand Corp., shared exclusively with ����Ӱ��.  

Of those who live in a state without education savings accounts or tax credits for private education, more than 70% said they would use public funds to offset homeschooling costs if they could, the data show. 

RAND’s American Life Panel on homeschool ESA use of parents who homeschool at least one child:

The similarity between the two figures is significant, said Angela Watson, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University and director of the Homeschool Research Lab.

“That gives some confidence that these responses are accurate,” she said. “Sometimes people will say they might do something when in reality, they wouldn’t actually do it. But here we see that people say and do things at the same rates.”

The lab commissioned Rand to ask the questions as part of its American Life Panel, a nationally representative sample of more than 2,400 parents with K-12 students. While homeschoolers only represented about 10% of the respondents, the data are among the first to independently measure their views on ESAs. The results follow from the ​​Arkansas Department of Education and the University of Arkansas showing that about a quarter of students who used that state’s ESA program last school year were homeschoolers. 

Most existing data come from advocates who private school choice, an issue that still sharply divides homeschoolers. Some remain strongly opposed to ESA programs and warn that they threaten parents’ rights to educate their children as they see fit. “Government cheese always comes in a trap,” one parent posted in the Texans for Homeschool Freedom Facebook group. 

On the topic of ESAs “there are not a lot of indifferent people,” said Kevin Boden, director of legal and legislative advocacy for the Home School Legal Defense Association. “They either think it’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened in education, or they think that it’s the thing to be most feared.”

James, for one, is grateful for the financial support. She wants to add music lessons and buy materials for STEM projects. The Texas program “makes those opportunities possible for us.”

Under the program, she’s eligible to receive $2,000 annually. But parents who choose an accredited private school will receive $10,474 or up to $30,000 for a child with a disability. 

While James prefers the “low-stress” environment of homeschooling, that funding gap is enough of an incentive to make some homeschoolers rethink their educational model.

“Maybe the family has always wanted to get into an accredited private school and now they can,” said Jeremy Newman, vice president of policy and engagement with the Texas Homeschool Coalition, which supports the state’s new program. “There are other families who say ‘Homeschooling is what would have been best for my child but we can’t afford what the child needs, so we’re going to have to go to this other option.’ ” 

Erin Flynn, lead instructor at , an Austin-area microschool for seventh through 12th graders, said she’s received several calls over the past few months from homeschooling families inquiring whether she will be accepting Education Freedom Accounts for tuition. 

Operating out of a converted house with a large porch, she offers a twice-a-week option for $600 per month and a full-time program for $950. She described the curriculum, which focuses on humanities, STEM and art, as “self-directed.” 

“We want to put the power back in students’ hands so that they aren’t just learning the canon; they’re learning how to identify what it is that they love,” said Flynn, a former English teacher. She was the principal of a charter school until she founded Hedge during the pandemic.

Microschools, she said, can be “a bridge” between homeschooling and traditional private school because they often allow students to attend part time. 

‘So many options’

According to Travis Pillow, spokesman for the Texas comptroller’s office, which runs the program, there’s no “seat time requirement.” As long as students are enrolled in a on the state’s list and take an annual assessment, they qualify as a private school student. 

To Pillow, who previously worked for the nonprofit running Florida’s school choice program, the different funding levels in Texas have been an adjustment. Florida’s program doesn’t differentiate between homeschoolers and private school students.

“I saw a lot of virtue in that idea because there are just so many options that don’t necessarily fit in a traditional box anymore,” he said. It’s hard in some cases, he said, to draw “a bright line” between schooling and homeschooling.

Some applicants educating their kids at home, he said, will likely enroll in approved online schools, which would qualify them for the larger award. But Newman, with the Coalition, also expects homeschoolers to pressure lawmakers to increase the amount for their children’s educational expenses. He thinks the proportion of homeschool applicants would be “dramatically higher” if the funds weren’t capped at $2,000.

“Many families homeschool because they have special needs children,” he said. Some types of therapy, “can very quickly surpass $2,000.” 

‘Out of necessity’

Texas isn’t the only state that offers different amounts for private school students and homeschoolers. Alabama’s awards $7,000 per student toward private school tuition and $2,000 for a “home education program.” Homeschooling families are capped at $4,000 even if they have more than two school-age children.

Texas and Alabama are “incentivizing people to go to private school and not to homeschool,” said Watson, with Johns Hopkins. But that could be a challenge for families living in rural areas without a lot of private school options, she said.

Like Florida, Arizona took a different approach when it passed the nation’s first universal ESA program in 2022. The base funding amount, which typically ranges between $7,000 and $8,000, is the same whether parents choose homeschooling or private school. Arizona parent Kathy Visser, whose son has disabilities, said $2,000 wouldn’t cover a month of his tutoring costs. In total, he receives about $40,000. Her daughter, formerly homeschooled, is now in a private school and receives $9,000.

“For families who choose to homeschool out of personal preference, I am sure the $2,000 is welcome,” she said. “For families like mine who homeschool out of necessity, because we could not find any traditional school that came close to meeting either of our kids’ needs, it wouldn’t go far.”

Arizona, however, is the state ESA critics most often point to for examples of a lack of guardrails on spending. A of expenditures turned up a number of “unallowable” items, like diamond jewelry, expensive gaming consoles and designer purses. State Superintendent Tom Horne of the program, but his methods for determining whether purchases violate the letter, or at least the spirit, of the law. 

Pillow said Texas limited homeschool awards to $2,000 because those families don’t have the “big ticket expense” of tuition. But another reason was to avoid “politically hard-to-explain purchases.” Parents also have to shop for supplies and materials within a “closed marketplace.” 

“Legos are legitimate educational items,” he said, noting purchases that have in Arizona. “But are we going to curate that marketplace with the latest and greatest collectors’ item? The $500 Harry Potter set is not necessarily going to be available.” 

Newman, with the Texas Homeschool Coalition, added that there’s much less “administrative weight” on the program when parents primarily spend the money on tuition. But both he and Pillow agreed that the state is likely to revisit the issue.

Don Huffines, who won the Republican nomination for comptroller, and is expected to easily win the general election in November, has said he the program. 

But the staunch conservative is also a . Newman said he hopes that means Huffines’ will be open to addressing the “disparities.”

“People have this idea of what they think homeschooling is,” he said. “It’s the people who have done it who really understand.” 

When Rachel Marshall was growing up in Virginia, her parents kept a magnet on the refrigerator from a national homeschooling advocacy group, with a phone number to call if local school officials tried to interfere with their decision to educate their children at home.

“You tell [the organization] the state’s after you, and they will come in with their lawyers and defend your right to homeschool and do what you want with your kids,” said Marshall, now a licensed counselor in Utah. “The state should be hands-off, that was their goal.”

Marshall wishes the state had been more hands-on. When she was a child, she said, her education and her safety were at the mercy of her parents, who struggled with mental illness and addiction.

“It was an ugly situation,” Marshall told Stateline. “But I think had there been some sort of regulation, some expectations from the state, I would not have been exposed to that as much.”

As homeschool enrollment has risen in recent years, so have concerns about oversight.

Recent high-profile child abuse deaths in several states have led to renewed calls from lawmakers for stronger regulations. They warn that some abusers claim they are homeschooling their kids when they pull them out of school, but really want to hide their crimes from teachers and other so-called mandatory reporters in public schools. Mandatory reporters are legally obligated to speak up about abuse if they suspect it.

But the push has inflamed a broader debate over parental rights and galvanized hundreds of homeschool groups to rally at statehouses around the country.

In every state, parents or guardians can withdraw their children from public or private school to be homeschooled. States allow this even if the caregiver has been the subject of , according to the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, an advocacy group. Nearly every state allows parents to withdraw children in the middle of an active investigation, and most states don’t prevent  from homeschooling their kids.

Lawmakers in states such as ,  and  have attempted to pass additional reporting requirements to guard against child abuse in homeschool settings.

They’re running up against parents’ rights groups and homeschooling advocates who argue that such regulations treat all homeschooling parents as potential criminals and aren’t necessary because many children in such situations are already on the radar of social service agencies. They say the additional requirements don’t address problems inside child protection agencies that allow such abuse to go unaddressed.

“When bad things happen, people feel compelled to do something, whether it makes a difference or not,” said Connecticut state Rep. Anne Dauphinais, a Republican who opposes homeschool regulation. “It’s often overreach of government, just because [lawmakers] want to feel good about doing something.”

In West Virginia, Democratic state Del. Shawn Fluharty said in an interview that he’d lost track of how many times he’s tried to get a bill passed that would prevent a parent from pulling a child out of public school to homeschool if social services is investigating the parent for possible child abuse or neglect. According to Stateline’s sister publication, West Virginia Watch, this year will mark .

Fluharty calls his bill “Raylee’s Law,” after an 8-year-old girl who died from severe abuse and neglect in 2018. Before her death, her abusers had pulled her out of public school after .

“At this point, I’m just pissed off,” Fluharty told Stateline. “We’ve had at least two other circumstances very similar to Raylee’s situation since I’ve been pushing this legislation.”

Fluharty said he’s considering revising the law’s name to also memorialize Kyneddi Miller, a West Virginia 14-year-old who . Her mother had pulled her from public school in 2021 to homeschool her.

The bill passed the House twice in recent years, with bipartisan support, but died in a Senate committee each time. It faces opposition from homeschooling advocates in the legislature, he said, as well as lobbying efforts from national homeschool groups.

“It’s not a complex situation,” said Fluharty. “It’s a glaring loophole that needs to be closed. The longer it stays open, the more vulnerable children are in West Virginia.”

Homeschool explosion

But interest is . In recent years, the 30 states that publicly report homeschool participation have seen those numbers grow. More than a third of those states recorded their  in the 2024-2025 school year, even exceeding pandemic-era peaks, according to a study published in November.

Homeschooling has increasingly been framed as a political and cultural choice, particularly in conservative circles where it’s promoted as a way to exercise control over children’s education amid anger over how schools address racial equity, gender identity and sexuality, school violence and vaccine requirements. Homeschool supporters praise its flexibility and safety. Others warn that minimal regulation can leave some children isolated from the visibility and protections built into public school systems.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, homeschool participation hovered around 2-3% of K-12 students. It exploded during the pandemic to a high of 11% of families, as learning outside of traditional schools became normalized. Now  in the United States are homeschooled, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The issue doesn’t always fall neatly along party lines. In Georgia,  prompted a  that prohibits caregivers from withdrawing a child from school for the purpose of evading detection of child abuse and neglect. It became law in 2019.

In Hawaii, Republican state Sen. Kurt Fevella filed a resolution in 2024 calling for the state to conduct a wellness visit for any child removed from school to be homeschooled. He was motivated by  in Hawaii who had been taken out of school for homeschooling. It died in committee.

Last year, Rachel Marshall gave testimony before Utah legislators who were considering a controversial bill that would remove part of a 2023 law requiring parents to attest they’ve never been convicted of child abuse before they’re allowed to homeschool their children.

Marshall opposed the bill, worried the state was erasing one more safeguard protecting the small subset of homeschooled children who are at risk of abuse or neglect. But as she sat listening to the homeschooling parents speaking in favor of it, their words sounded familiar.

“I could hear the fear and rage that someone would take away your rights,” she said. “But I think if you are being investigated by [child protective services], you should not be allowed to withdraw your children from daily mandated reporters like schoolteachers.”

The bill’s chief sponsor, Republican state Rep. Nicholeen Peck, said her goal was to remove a portion of state homeschooling law that was ineffective, had created confusion for school districts, and unfairly stigmatized homeschooling families.

The Utah legislature passed the bill and it was signed into law last spring.

Statehouse rallies

Studies are mixed on whether children who are homeschooled are more likely to be victims of abuse.

A  of homeschooled and conventionally schooled adults found homeschooled children aren’t necessarily more likely to report experiencing abuse or neglect.

But among abuse victims, isolation from mandated reporters — like school teachers — is a common thread. A  found that nearly half of child torture victims had been pulled from school to be homeschooled to evade suspicions of abuse. Withdrawal from school to homeschool under suspicious circumstances is  and is associated with higher risk factors for abuse, according to a report from the Coalition for Responsible Home Education.

More than 1 in 5 children withdrawn from school for homeschooling in Connecticut lived in families with at least one substantiated report from the state’s child services agency, according to a report released last year from Connecticut’s Office of the Child Advocate. The office based its findings on a sample of more than 700 children aged 7-11 who were withdrawn from school for homeschooling between July 2021 and June 2024.

For homeschooling families who’ve been providing their children with a high-quality education without oversight, “I can understand why they might feel they don’t need to be regulated,” said Christina Ghio, Connecticut’s child advocate.

“But as a state, we have an obligation to all children,” she told Stateline. “We know there are children whose parents say they’re homeschooling who are not. The challenge is, there’s one set of rules that has to apply to everybody.”

Her office’s report recommended state lawmakers create requirements for annual assessments of homeschoolers.

The report was issued in the wake of a high-profile abuse case: A Connecticut man was rescued in February 2025 after authorities say he’d been  for two decades. His stepmother had pulled him from public school in fourth grade after  with concerns he was being abused.

But when lawmakers gathered for hearings on homeschooling regulation last May, after Ghio’s report, , most of them homeschool families, flooded the state’s Legislative Office Building to protest, according to the CT Mirror.

In Illinois, Democratic lawmakers introduced a sweeping homeschool regulation bill last year that, among other things, would have banned those convicted of sexual abuse crimes from homeschooling. It was  by an  from Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica into the state’s nearly nonexistent homeschool regulation.

But while the bill cleared its committee,  and supporters packed the Illinois State Capitol to oppose it. It never made it to a full vote in the House.

Despite pushback, Connecticut House Speaker Matt Ritter, a Democrat, has signaled his interest in revisiting some kind of oversight during this legislative session.

“I don’t think this is a fight about homeschooling,” he said during  earlier this month, citing cases like the highly publicized death of 11-year-old Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres-Garcia.

In October, the girl’s remains were found on an abandoned property in Connecticut. The family had  with the state’s social services, but her mother emailed school officials in July 2024 to tell them she planned to homeschool her daughter. Authorities say that less than two months later, the girl was dead. An autopsy confirmed her death was caused by .

Dauphinais, the Connecticut Republican, told Stateline she doesn’t believe any of the proposed homeschool requirements she’s heard from her Democratic colleagues would have saved children like Mimi Torres-Garcia.

“If you want to abuse your child, you’re going to abuse your child and you are never going to show up for any kind of annual evaluation,” she said. “They will game the system. We’re not talking about the 99.9% of homeschoolers doing it genuinely. We’re talking about people doing evil things.”

Ritter said families that have been investigated by child protective services or law enforcement need more follow-up. But he was candid about the long road that regulation might face: “That might get really ugly, Republican versus Democrat. I think it depends on how it gets drafted.”

National advocacy

In Utah, some of the speakers supporting removing reporting requirements from state law included representatives from the same organization that was on Marshall’s family’s refrigerator magnet: the Home School Legal Defense Association.

It’s one of the most visible homeschooling organizations in statehouses around the nation, fighting homeschool regulation of all kinds.

The group argues that the intent behind such regulation is good, but misplaced, and that such regulations unfairly burden homeschooling families without meaningfully overhauling the systems — like social services agencies — that are tasked with protecting kids from abuse.

Homeschool families struggle with “being treated as though they were being lumped in with felons, being lumped in with kidnappers, being lumped in with people who had harmed their children,” said Peter Kamakawiwoole, an attorney with the Home School Legal Defense Association, during a Utah House committee  last January.

Also tracking such legislation are groups like the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, which was founded by former homeschoolers and advocates for oversight and accountability in homeschooling. The group drafted  it calls the Make Homeschool Safe Act that proposes certain state reporting requirements for homeschooling families. The Home School Legal Defense Association .

Fluharty, the West Virginia lawmaker, said that when he’s accused of “going after homeschoolers,” he encourages them to read the bill. He believes the national homeschooling lobbyists are lying to families about what his legislation really does.

The goal of such regulation isn’t to take away homeschoolers’ rights, said Marshall. It’s not even necessarily for the kids whose cases wind up in front of child protective services. Instead, she said, it’s for the kids that no one can see.

“These kids are invisible,” she said. “Homeschooling is inherently isolating. Other kids are going to school and have teachers in their lives, a bus driver in their life.”

But for homeschooled kids, “If you are being abused or your education is being neglected, your parents aren’t telling others that. Nobody knows. It feels like the state doesn’t care.”

More Ohio students are being homeschooled now than during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The number of Ohio students being homeschooled was trending upward pre-pandemic, spiked to about 51,500 students during the COVID-19 pandemic and dipped back down slightly.

But homeschooling recently saw another surge with about 53,000 homeschooled students during the 2023-24 school year, according to data from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.

The number of homeschooled students in Ohio, according to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce:

• 2023-24: 53,051 students
• 2022-23: 47,468 students
• 2021-22: 47,491 students
• 2020-21: 51,502 students
• 2019-20: 33,328 students
• 2018-19: 32,887 students
• 2017-18: 30,923 students

There were about 3.1 million homeschooled students nationwide in 2021-22 — quite the jump from 2.5 million in spring 2019, according to the.

“Homeschooling was already on a slightly slower upward trajectory, and had been for a number of years,” said Douglas J. Pietersma, research associate at National Home Education Research Institute. “What COVID did, from our perspective, is just infused it.”

He expects the number of homeschooled students to keep growing.

“It’s not going to put public schools out of business or anything like that, but it’s going to be a slow growth that is certainly going to be measurable over time,” Pietersma said.

Remote learning during the pandemic made parents become more aware of what was being taught in schools, said Melanie Elsey, Christian Home Educators of Ohio’s legislative liaison.

“I don’t think that it was a mass exodus from the public or private schools into homeschooling, but for parents who felt like they could accomplish more with one-on-one attention to learning … You can tailor the education to meet the needs of their children,” she said.

Not everyone who switched to homeschooling stayed after the pandemic, Elsey said.

“Some of them put their children back in because it was too much of a commitment,” she said. “So I think it was sort of a time period that parents felt comfortable trying something different to see if they could help their children learn more.”

The modern home education movement sprung out of the 1970s and “skyrocketed” in the 1980s, Pietersma said.

“People were either upset with the quality of education in general,” he said. “Then another group of people, it was more about the content of education.”

Today there are many reasons why a family might opt for homeschooling.

“Obviously, the quality of education is still one of the big issues,” Pietersma said. “Safety issues are a huge thing. People who have had their children in schools where they’ve been bullied or assaulted or had exposure to drugs … given the size of school, it may be not impossible to prevent some of those things.”

The reason for homeschooling varies and it is not always because a family is not satisfied with their local school district, Elsey said.

She homeschooled her children, but did not originally think it was for her family. However, she changed her mind after she enjoyed being home with her children through their preschool years.

“We prayed about it and really felt like it was something that was worthwhile,” Elsey said.

Jeannine Ramer has homeschooled her four children — two are now in college and two (ages 17 and 13) are currently being homeschooled.

“Homeschooling has really strengthened our family relationships, my kids are very, very close and supportive of one another, and I think that’s all of the hours spent at home and just really learning together,” said Ramer, who lives in Alliance.

They were not initially planning on homeschooling their children, but Ramer’s sister-in-law homeschooled her children and encouraged them to think about it as their oldest approached preschool age.

They decided to try it for a year or two, but found it worked well for their family.

“We loved it,” Ramer said. “We’ve had the ability to tailor each child’s education to that child.”

A parent does not need to be a licensed teacher in order to homeschool their children, Elsey said.

“It’s amazing how well families do because they have access to resources, really, all over the world, when you can get curriculum from anywhere that meets the needs of your students to learn to pursue their interests,” she said.

Families who decide to homeschool their children enjoy the flexibility, Pietersma said.

“They can tailor the education that they’re providing to their child in so many ways that an institutional school can’t just because of sheer numbers,” he said. “One teacher in a classroom with 30 students can’t take the lesson plan and tailor it to each of the 30 students.”

Ramer’s oldest child was interested in printing and design work as a teenager, so they were able to craft his high school education to those areas. Now he is studying industrial and innovative design in college.

“It just allowed us the ability to foster that,” she said. “There was much more flexibility.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

Homeschooling in recent years, . But researchers are still exploring why parents choose to homeschool their children.

Now, a new analysis, exclusive to ����Ӱ��, sheds light on why he’s had so much trouble. While it’s common knowledge that in the state House have been standing in his way, homeschool parents opposed to education savings accounts have also been part of the resistance. 

Leslie Finger, a political science professor at the University of North Texas, analyzed roll call votes on 13 private school choice bills that reached the floor of either the state House or the Senate between 2013 and 2023. She found that lawmakers were more likely to vote against private school choice not only if they represented a rural area, but also if they had more homeschoolers in their districts.

“We specifically opted out of this system,” Faith Howe, president of Texans for Homeschool Freedom, said about public schools. While proponents of the voucher plan say it will be optional for families, that doesn’t satisfy Howe. “I don’t think they’re going to have a problem coming back and saying ‘Well we need more regulations on these homeschoolers.’”

Texas voters ousted the Republican holdouts in last year’s primary election after Abbott campaigned against them. He is counting on their replacements to deliver a victory this session. But even if that happens, Finger’s results point to a segment of parents who have been getting louder in recent years as ESAs, which parents can spend on tuition or homeschooling costs, have spread across red states. Many traditional homeschoolers fought for the right to educate their children at home and fear that ESA laws could erode some of those protections — even if they don’t take the funds. 

While voucher advocates dismiss many of the homeschoolers’ concerns, Finger said her findings should serve as a warning.

“The presence of big homeschooling communities could make selling private school choice challenging,” Finger said.

‘Government control’

That was certainly the case in Colorado, one of three states last November where voters defeated school choice ballot measures. 

“Government money comes with government control,” said Carolyn Martin, who monitors state legislation for Christian Home Educators of Colorado. Her group viewed the measure as a potential infringement on parents’ rights to educate their children as they see fit.  

Two issues raised red flags for them. The measure said all children should be able to “access a quality education,” which they interpreted as an opportunity for the government to define quality for homeschoolers. It also gave students, as well as parents, the right to school choice. That could spell trouble if kids and parents aren’t on the same page when it comes to education, Martin said.

“At some point the state would probably have to step in and arbitrate between the parent and the child,” she said. “That is not our worldview.”

Other homeschoolers say ESAs contradict conservative values, such as smaller government and less regulation. Gary Humble, executive director of Tennessee Stands, a Christian organization, called the state’s recently passed voucher bill “wealth redistribution.”

“This is another Tennessee entitlement program,” he said. “It’s expensive. It’s irresponsible.” 

The state is expected to spend $1 billion on the program over the next five years. While opponents weren’t able to stop the Republicans from passing the law, Humble tells homeschoolers that if they participate, they could be giving up the freedom to educate their children the way they choose.

“All they hear from special interest groups is that they get seven grand and there are no strings attached,” he said. “They’re not policy wonks, so they don’t understand the trap doors that are laid out ahead of them.”  

ESA programs often require homeschooling families to reapply for funding every year, to take annual standardized tests and to only buy approved items from specific vendors. Homeschooling families who don’t participate want to ensure such restrictions don’t eventually extend to them. 

But those worries fall under what Jeremy Newman, vice president of policy and engagement for the Texas Homeschool Coalition, calls “free-floating anxiety.” 

“They’re concerned somebody is going to do something, sometime, but they’re not sure who or when or what,” he said. 

His organization is strongly in favor of passing a voucher bill in Texas, saying that tax-paying homeschoolers should have just as much access to state education funds as parents who send their kids to public school.

He points to on “regulatory creep” from Angela Watson, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and an expert on . She found that publicly funded school choice programs, like ESAs, don’t contribute to more government overreach. 

Not ‘a monolith’

But the fact that some homeschoolers are so opposed to them proves a point, Watson said. 

“The mistake that everyone makes when they talk about homeschooling is that they continue to think of it as a monolith,” she said. “Homeschooling is just so varied.”

Nationally, of the nation’s students are homeschooled, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Traditional homeschoolers often chose that path for ideological or religious reasons. 

But many new converts, who left public schools during the pandemic, show support for what former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos calls “” — allowing parents to spend education dollars on any type of schooling they choose. It’s a policy that polled high in a from the National Parents Union, with 71% of parents favoring such a system. 

The split among homeschoolers over ESAs, Watson said, has created some “interesting bedfellows” — conservative parents aligning with liberal teachers unions to oppose school choice ballot measures. That’s what happened, not only in Colorado, but also in , where two-thirds of voters rejected such a proposition last year.  

Howe in Texas has heard the criticism. “We’re being accused of being leftist, Marxist and supporting the teachers unions,” she said. 

Newman, with the Texas coalition, said his group is watching out for homeschoolers’ interests. Leaders maintain a “strong presence” at the state capitol in Austin to ensure legislation doesn’t interfere with homeschoolers’ freedom to choose their own curriculum and teaching methods, he said. 

Homeschooled himself as a child, Newman sympathizes with those who recall when it was to educate children at home and not unusual for child protective services to a family when a neighbor reported children not being in school.

But Howe notes that it was a state regulation in Texas — not legislation — that treated homeschooled students as truant. After a lengthy legal fight, the state that parents who homeschool are essentially small private schools.

In Idaho, it’s the state tax commission that will be writing some of the rules for a new that Gov. Brad Little signed into law last month, despite from the public. The state also has an existing grant program targeted toward lower-income families.

Audra Talley, a board member of Homeschool Idaho, said Republican lawmakers have assured her that as long as they control the legislature and the governor’s office, homeschoolers don’t have to worry about rules encroaching on their parental rights. But that’s what she finds disturbing.

“It’s an admission that the potential exists,” she said. “Now we are relying on a certain party or a certain group of individuals to keep those regulations from coming at some future date.”

‘Don’t want to go back’

She’s not exaggerating that some Democrats would prefer to increase monitoring of families who homeschool.

A , for example, would require families to notify their local school district if they intend to homeschool. Families would have to submit teaching materials and their children’s work if authorities are concerned about their education. Hundreds of at the state capitol against the bill earlier this month.

Under another , Michigan homeschoolers would have to register with the state. Superintendent Michael Rice argues that officials should have a count of students in all types of schooling — public, private, parochial and home. and neglect involving homeschool families led to his proposal for more oversight. 

Homeschoolers opposed to ESAs often point to West Virginia — a Republican-led state — as an example of how lawmakers sometimes forget that not everyone wants the government’s money.

The state passed its Hope Scholarship ESA program in 2021, which requires homeschooled students receiving the scholarship to take annual or have their work reviewed each year by a certified teacher.  The law specifically exempted homeschoolers not in the program from the requirements, but a 2023 bill would have erased what advocates call a “carve out” if they hadn’t stepped in. 

ESA proponents use the same example to say the homeschoolers’ fears were overblown and no harm was done. Colleen Hroncich, a policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, thinks the division among homeschoolers over school choice will fade over time.

“As we get further past the generation of homeschoolers that fought for the right to homeschool, it seems like most homeschoolers support funding programs,” she said. “Hopefully the bigger numbers also help push back on additional regulations down the road.”

“It took the joy out of teaching and learning.”

McClymont became a stay-at-home mom and planned to homeschool her daughter, but she missed the classroom. In the fall of 2023, she began leading a learning pod with three children in her neighborhood. That was when she heard about microschools, or the intentionally small, low cost, often mixed-age learning communities that have gained widespread popularity in recent years. She was immediately attracted to microschooling’s focus on flexibility and personalized learning, and knew for certain that she wanted to launch her own microschool. But where should she begin? 

Most microschool founders are teachers like McClymont who previously worked in conventional schools. According to a by the National Microschooling Center, more than 70 percent of today’s microschool operators are current or former licensed educators. These founders have deep knowledge of curriculum and pedagogy and a passion for teaching and learning, but most of them have never run a small business. 

They are looking for ways to bridge the gap between being an educator and an entrepreneur, and new microschool accelerator programs are helping them to do just that.

“Put me in a classroom anywhere and I can teach all day. I got that. I was looking for all those business tips and tricks,” said Tonya Kipe, founder of in Polk City, Florida. A public elementary school teacher for more than a decade, Kipe grew her microschool from one student in January 2024 to 26 students today, including those with special learning needs. Participating in , a Florida-based nonprofit microschool accelerator, was a key part of Kipe Academy’s growth. 

Created by former public school teacher Iman Alleyne in 2022, Launch Your Kind supports the development of new microschools — especially those that celebrate diversity, inclusivity, and joyful learning. 

After launching her own microschool, , in 2016, Alleyne wished she had an affordable, model-agnostic school accelerator program available to her to provide the business skills, entrepreneurial insights, and community support that she lacked. She wanted to streamline the startup process for new founders, enabling them to avoid common pitfalls and build sustainable small businesses. “I teach them to take care of their teacher hat, but their business owner hat needs to come on too,” she said. 

The 10-week program provides online, cohort-style coaching for about a dozen new or aspiring microschool founders, and continued support thereafter. Through weekly check-ins and expert presentations, they learn the business of running a school, ranging from establishing policies and procedures and finding a suitable school location to setting tuition prices, exploring various revenue streams, and being fiscally responsible. Alleyne’s goal is to help microschools flourish and grow, and she helps founders to merge their love of teaching with a keen sense of what it takes to run a successful enterprise. Most Launch Your Kind founders launch or expand their microschools within six months of participating in the program, with each cohort community remaining in close contact long after the program ends — including through an annual in-person retreat. Launch Your Kind’s winter cohort begins later this month.

For Kipe, participating in Launch Your Kind helped her to see that entrepreneurship can be a win-win for herself and the students she serves. “We want to serve the community, but we’re also a business,” Kipe realized. 

Like most of the Florida microschools that have participated in Launch Your Kind, Kipe Academy’s students attend at reduced tuition rates thanks to the state’s robust school choice programs that enable education dollars to follow students to their desired learning setting — including microschools and homeschooling centers. Family financial accessibility is an important priority for the microschool founders with whom Alleyne works. It’s also Alleyne’s priority with Launch Your Kind. “I really wanted to put together an accelerator that would be at a price point that people could afford,” said Alleyne, who has received philanthropic support from organizations such as Stand Together Trust, Getting Smart, VELA, and the Yass Prize, which has helped to defray participant costs. 

After discovering microschooling in 2023 while running her learning pod, McClymont saw a post on social media by Kipe mentioning Launch Your Kind. She connected with Alleyne and joined the next accelerator cohort in 2024, growing her program, , from three students to 13. She serves both neurodiverse and neurotypical students in her current microschool location in West Sunrise, Florida, and is in the process of opening a second location in Coral Springs. She credits the accelerator program as a primary reason for her early success and continued growth. “To be a teacher is one thing; to be an entrepreneur and run a successful microschool is another. There were a lot of things that I didn’t know, like certain legalities, marketing, and just the logistics of how to run the company,” said McClymont, adding that the connection to a small community of founders within the Launch Your Kind cohort was also invaluable. 

One piece of entrepreneurial input was particularly helpful. “I was grossly undercharging myself and Iman had to have a conversation with me,” recalled McClymont. “She told me, ‘you are undercharging for what you have to offer and you need to raise your prices. Yes, you’re doing this out of the goodness of your heart but you’re running a business now.’” For McClymont, that type of candid feedback was exactly what she needed to take her business to the next level to serve even more students throughout South Florida. Adopting a solid business mindset was how McClymont would be able to do the most good for the most students. “I think that’s something that a lot of educators probably struggle with,” she added.

McClymont has observed significant academic and social-emotional gains in her students, and plans to continue to open new microschools as parent demand grows. She is also considering the possibility of creating a franchise model to help other educators launch their own Tree Stars Learning locations without having to start from scratch. 

She said she thinks the microschooling movement is just beginning: “I feel like we are the Uber of taxis: I believe that microschools are going to take over. Especially in South Florida, parents are looking for other options because they see how the public school is not serving their child. It’s getting to a point where they have to close down some public schools here. Parents are seeking other options, and I just want to be a positive light.”

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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“Families are looking for something different,” GROW Program Director, Elizabeth López, told me when I visited the learning center last month. Located in the New Life Worship Center, a large, fast-growing, predominantly Hispanic Christian church in New England’s second largest city, GROW is part of the congregation’s mission to support families in and around their community. Similar church-based learning centers for homeschoolers are sprouting across Massachusetts, as more families seek alternatives to conventional schools. 

“These centers are inspiring not just the parents to engage more in the education of their children, but grandma and grandpa and auntie and uncle. The church is truly rallying together the family to raise up the children,” said Michael King, CEO of the Massachusetts Family Institute, a conservative advocacy organization that is helping to catalyze the creation of low-cost, church-based learning centers like GROW. Over the past three years, King’s organization has supported the launch of 15 of these learning centers across the Bay State, serving approximately 600 students. 

This may help to explain why Massachusetts is one of at least 19 states reporting an increase in 2023-24 homeschooling numbers compared to the prior academic year, according to analyzed by Dr. Angela Watson at Johns Hopkins University. While Massachusetts, like many states, experienced a large surge in homeschoolers during the pandemic and related school closures, this recent uptick in homeschooling is being caused by unknown factors. 

“What is clear is that this time, the growth is not driven by a global pandemic or sudden disruptions to traditional schooling,” Watson concluded. “Something else is driving this growth.” 

According to López, families are attracted to homeschooling with GROW because it provides a safe, nurturing, family-centered, values-affirming learning environment. “Students here feel like they’re in a safe and trusting environment, and their parents feel the same way,” López told me. Indeed, the most recent federal on homeschooling released in September reveals that a top reason why parents choose homeschooling is that they are “concerned about the school environment, such as safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure.” 

Homeschooling allows GROW families — most of whom are Hispanic — to have much more control over their children’s education. They collaborate closely with the learning center’s nine staff members and seven additional adult volunteers, who work to individualize learning to meet children’s specific academic needs. 

I talked with some of the parents of students who attend GROW to find out why they chose homeschooling over conventional schooling in recent years. “I think that there has definitely been a big shift in the curriculum, what is being taught in schools, and how that doesn’t align with my values and my beliefs,” said Tanya Tovar, a behavior analyst whose son Sebastian is a full-time first-grader at GROW. As Sebastian neared kindergarten age,Tovar looked into conventional public and private schools — including traditional Christian ones — but none appealed to her. She decided instead to enroll Sebastian at GROW last year, due in large part to its emphasis on faith-based education along with high-quality academics targeted to each child’s academic ability. 

GROW’s customized approach to education has enabled Sebastian to do advanced coursework, challenging him in ways Tovar thinks wouldn’t be possible in a conventional classroom. But for Tovar, GROW is about more than just Sebastian’s academics. “He’s happy, he loves his classroom, he loves his friends,” she said, adding that she plans to keep her son, and eventually his one-year-old sister, at GROW through high school. “I want them to be able to think independently, have autonomy for themselves and for their life. I think GROW does that. I think homeschooling does that.”

Erika Serrano agrees. She has an eleventh-grade daughter and a second-grade son at GROW, along with her three-year-old daughter, who attends part-time. A full-time community health worker, Serrano’s two older children attended Worcester Public Schools before enrolling at GROW last year. It was when her daughter began her freshman year at the public high school that Serrano realized she had to make a change. “That was a tough year for us,” she told me, explaining how her daughter’s behavior changed from middle school and how she was encountering negative peer pressure. 

Since attending GROW, Serrano has noticed a transformational change in her daughter. “Honestly, it makes me so emotional because she has flourished into such a beautiful, kind young woman since she’s been going to GROW. Words can’t even express how thankful I am. This has been such a great opportunity for us,” said Serrano, adding that her daughter plans to attend college after high school and become a teacher. Last year, GROW had its first high school graduate who received multiple college acceptances, beginning his freshman year this fall. 

Some students attend GROW a couple of days a week, but the majority are enrolled full-time, five days a week at an annual tuition of $2,400. To defray tuition costs even further, GROW has recently partnered with Children’s Scholarship Fund (CSF), a national nonprofit founded in 1998 that provides low-income families with partial scholarships to attend private schools. CSF is now offering scholarships to students who attend creative schooling options, such as microschools and learning centers. (Parents are encouraged to check if their school participates in CSF’s scholarship programs)

The parents I spoke with expect GROW and homeschool learning centers like it to continue to gain popularity, both in Massachusetts and across the country. They say that more parents are looking for alternatives to traditional schooling and, as more of these alternatives sprout, it makes it easier to choose something else.

“I grew up in the public school system,” Serrano told me. “I raised my daughter mostly in the public school system. That’s all I knew, but I knew I needed to shift. I was so scared because you think this is the only way, right? But then I said, wait a minute, there are so many other ways that our kids could be educated.”

Serrano urges parents to consider new and different educational models. “Be open-minded,” she said. “Take that leap of faith and do what you know is right for your children.”

“I felt there had to be something different,” said the school’s founder, Candice Hilton, who quit her job as a public school teacher last December after seven years in the system. Her daughter had just started kindergarten that fall and it provided a new lens through which Hilton could view today’s schooling. “Her teacher was amazing,” said Hilton, “but she told me how bored she was doing worksheets.” 

At the same time, Hilton was reflecting on all of the required standardized testing in today’s schools and the pressures it was creating for students and teachers alike. “We tested the kids so many days straight. It was just a sad space to be in for our education system,” recalled Hilton.

After leaving the public school system, Hilton began researching what it would take to homeschool her daughter. It was through that research that she decided to become a microschool founder. She opened Hilton Horizons Academy in a cheerful rented space inside a culinary school with a dozen K-8 students. A hybrid microschool, Hilton’s students attend the mixed-age program two or three days a week for individualized academics and enrichment. Tuition for the three-day program is $4,900 a year. All of Hilton’s students are legally homeschooled, with the vast majority of them new to homeschooling this academic year. “Most of my students are coming from public school. Most of them are first-time homeschoolers,” said Hilton, adding that only two of her current students were previously homeschooled.

At , which opened in Goodyear, Arizona one week after Hilton Horizons Academy, founder Elisa Hernandez’s 14 microschool students are a mix of homeschoolers and those coming from traditional public or private schools. A high school English teacher who taught in the public school system for 10 years, Hernandez quit for reasons similar to Hilton. Post-Covid, she noticed that schools became even more focused on standardized testing, perhaps as a result of more attention being paid to alleged learning loss during pandemic school closures. “There was a shift where we were told to teach to that standardized test. Your worth as a teacher was now tied to that score, or your students’ scores. That was a big shift for me,” recalled Hernandez. 

Last year, she began a small tutoring business on the side while still teaching full-time in the public schools. She enjoyed it so much that she decided to turn the tutoring business into a dedicated microschool, leaving her teaching job at the end of the school year in May. Hernandez wanted to create the type of school in which she knew children would thrive. “I think that learning should be fun and learning should be personalized. If those two things are happening, that can be groundbreaking and world-changing,” she said.

Students attend Hernandez’s home-based program for sixth to twelfth graders up to four days a week at an annual cost of $5,600. She intentionally set her tuition below the approximately $7,000 that all Arizona K-12 students are now eligible to receive under the state’s universal education savings account (ESA) program. “I wanted to make sure that they had enough money left over to do sports, clubs, whatever it is that they want to do,” said Hernandez.

Microschools and similarly creative schooling options gained increased popularity in the wake of the pandemic, and they continue to gain momentum. Not only are new schools and spaces opening across the U.S. but existing ones are expanding. 

New from VELA, a philanthropic nonprofit organization and entrepreneur community, reveals that over 90 percent of the unconventional learning environments it surveyed had more learners last fall than they did at their launch date, and the median compound rate of growth for these programs was 25 percent a year. 

As parent demand for more individualized, innovative education options grows, more everyday entrepreneurs are stepping up to meet that demand, while finding greater personal and professional satisfaction as school founders. Many of them are former public school teachers like Hilton and Hernandez who grew tired of one-size-fits-all standardized schooling and wanted to create an alternative. According to its 2024 sector , the National Microschooling Centers estimates that over 70 percent of today’s microschool founders are current or former licensed educators.

“I’m not a business person. I’m an English teacher,” Hernandez says, acknowledging that she initially felt intimidated by the idea of starting a school. She, like Hilton, decided to join the program earlier this year to gain support and mentorship before, during, and after launch. Started by Amar Kumar, founder of the national microschool network, KaiPod Learning, the Catalyst program provides business startup support and ongoing operational assistance to school founders. The cohort-style program is free to participants, with a small revenue-sharing agreement if they decide to launch a school following the program.

“We started KaiPod Catalyst because we saw tens of thousands of educators looking for alternative career paths in many of the same communities where families were looking for alternative education options,” Kumar told me, adding that applications for the fall cohort are now open.

The new school founders I spoke with say the support from KaiPod Catalyst has been invaluable as they move from their role as teachers to teacher-entrepreneurs. “I think that something that stopped me from starting a microschool earlier was the lack of mentorship,” said Amanda Lucas, who taught in private and charter schools throughout New York City for about a decade. She also participated in a KaiPod Catalyst cohort earlier this year. “I didn’t have any mentors, and I didn’t have anyone to go to and to help me get through the tough times and answer questions,” added Lucas. 

Her microschool, , launches on September 4th in a leased, home-like space in Old Bridge, New Jersey. She currently has 10 enrolled students, ages 6 to 13, with two additional teachers. Her full-time program costs $15,000 a year, with various part-time enrollment options. 

Lucas expects to expand in the coming months given the increased number of inquiries she has been receiving from interested families, but she plans to remain a microschool for homeschoolers, rather than become a recognized private school. “Private schools, like charter schools, don’t give you all of the freedom that a microschool does,” said Lucas. “I want full autonomy, and I want absolute freedom in education. I also really believe in homeschooling and if we have too many students, I won’t be able to tailor the education the way that I want to,” she said.

As the new school year begins, new schools are sprouting across the country, offering the personalization, freedom, and flexibility that enable both students and teachers to flourish.

Disclosure: Stand Together Trust provides financial support to Vela Education Fund and ����Ӱ��.

Alaska’s Supreme Court justices on Friday that struck down key components of the state’s correspondence school program.

Nearly 23,000 homeschool students may continue to use their allotments of state education money to pay for private school tuition until the Anchorage Superior Court reconsiders the case.

The Supreme Court made its decision a day after oral arguments in an appeal of the ruling in State of Alaska, Department of Education and Early Development v. Alexander, in which plaintiffs argued that it is unconstitutional for public education money to be spent on private school tuition.

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The justices explained that they issued a quickly to avoid affecting thousands of students’ education and will complete a formal ruling later.

Supreme Court justices agreed with the state’s hired lawyer, Elbert Lin, that the lower court wrongly decided the state’s statute was unconstitutional in its entirety. They said state law could be preserved “because there are many constitutionally permissible uses of allotment funds.”

They sent the ruling back and directed the Superior Court to consider whether spending is unconstitutional on a case-by-case basis. That could mean individual districts, which are directly responsible for monitoring allotment spending, would be the defendants, rather than the Department of Education and Early Development. The justices wrote that they could not make such a ruling now because no districts were present, or joined in the lawsuit, at the time of the appeal.

They also directed the Superior Court to consider a group of correspondence families’ argument that the U.S. Constitution requires the state to allow families to use allotments on private school tuition.

Both the state and the parents who use state money to send their children to private schools asked the court to decide whether it is constitutional for families to spend the homeschool allotment on full-time private school tuition.

“We decline to make such a ruling at this point,” the justices wrote, and explained that the issue did not come up in the original case and neither plaintiffs nor the correspondence families submitted arguments about it in their appeal.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy, Education Commissioner Deena Bishop and Attorney General Trag Taylor praised the decision. “The Alaska Supreme Court clearly saw the flaws in the prior decision and in the plaintiffs’ arguments,” said Taylor in a news release.  “To strike down the entire statutory scheme on the allegations of one type of unconstitutional spending does not comport with the laws of statutory and constitutional interpretation. Statutes are presumed constitutional and there must be a high bar to strike them down. This is a win for the rule of law as well as Alaskan families.”

wife Jodi Taylor wrote a step-by-step of how families can use allotments for classes at private schools.

Scott Kendall, attorney for the plaintiffs, said the justice’s decision may not be what he wanted, but he feels confident about the case.

“They were much more concerned with the procedural aspects of their case, not the substance,” he said.

When the Superior Court reconsiders the case, the plaintiffs could  identify a district that allows correspondence allotments. Kendall said that a school district may even seek to join the case of its own volition, to argue that its practices should be allowed.

“I am not a betting man, but if I was, I would bet big money on the fact that you cannot constitutionally spend public funds through a correspondence program for tuition at a private school,” he said. “It’s just going to take us just a bit longer to reach that ultimate outcome.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com. Follow Alaska Beacon on and .

“I thought I would be out of my element,” Moore told me when I met him earlier this month at the school, where he has worked since last fall. “I quickly became a convert. This fits what kids need. Parents are making this choice to meet the needs of their kids because public schools can’t do it anymore. I’m absolutely sold on what happens here,” he added.

What happens is deep, joyful learning tied to student interests that blends academic and social-emotional skills in a relaxed, nature-based setting. 

Founded in 1970 by a group of parents looking for a more holistic educational approach for their children, School Around Us operated as a state-recognized K-8 private school until 2020 when the school leaders decided to shift away from a traditional schooling model to a learning community serving homeschoolers. 

It’s part of a growing trend, both in Maine and nationally, of new schools and spaces offering smaller, more individualized, more flexible learning options that parents and teachers desire. Many of these programs, including School Around Us, are part of the that supports alternative education environments across the U.S. with grants and entrepreneurial resources.

Converting to a homeschooling community has enabled School Around Us to serve the rapidly growing population of homeschoolers in their area. According to the new Johns Hopkins University , homeschooling numbers now hover around six percent of the total K-12 school-age population, a dramatic increase from pre-pandemic estimates. Maine has seen its homeschooling numbers high since 2020. 

“We have doubled in size since before the pandemic and our numbers keep climbing,” said Amy Wentworth, a Maine certified teacher who attended School Around Us as a child and has taught there for over 20 years. School Around Us now serves 43 students with both full-time and part-time enrollment options. Wentworth says that since 2020, parents are looking to be more involved with their children’s education and appreciate more personalized learning options — especially immersive ones like School Around Us that embrace Maine’s natural beauty and abundant community resources. 

“It’s reinvigorated me in my teaching,” said Wentworth about her program’s shift from operating as a private school to a homeschooling co-learning community. “I feel rejuvenated with excitement and huge possibilities for the future.”

Ning Sawangjaeng feels similarly rejuvenated. A longtime teacher at an established Montessori school in Maine, Sawangjaeng was eager for a new opportunity. She joined the in Camden as its founding Lead Guide when the program launched in September 2023. “The core of Giving Tree is that kids can be happy and be themselves,” Sawangjaeng told me during my visit, adding that the hours the children spend each day outside and in the forest trails surrounding the center are crucial to their overall learning and growth.

Jessica Mazur, along with Isabella Wincklhofer, cofounded Giving Tree to meet the needs of their children and others in their community. 

A former operations leader at Apple who now runs her own small consulting business, Mazur explained how the pandemic shifted her views on education. Her oldest child had attended local public schools, but during school closures and the ongoing education disruption of 2020 and beyond, Mazur began to consider alternatives to conventional schooling. As schooling returned to normal, she and several other parents in her community were already hooked on a different vision for education. “Once we saw what education could be, we couldn’t unsee it,” said Mazur.

Like so many entrepreneurial parents, Mazur decided to build what she couldn’t find: a personalized, Montessori-inspired, nature-based learning space for a mixed-age group of homeschoolers ages five and up. Giving Tree now serves 20 learners ages five to 12 with most choosing to attend the center four days a week. Part-time enrollment options are also available, and interest in the program continues to spread through parent word of mouth.

That’s also how in Cape Elizabeth has grown from six kids in the fall of 2020 to 36 K-5 students for the upcoming school year. 

Like Mazur, Roots’s founder, Jaclyn Gallo, realized during the pandemic that she needed to take charge of her children’s education. She opened her state-recognized private school in a yoga studio during its first year, but demand kept growing for her personalized, place-based educational mode where all children are taught by certified teachers. Last fall, Gallo expanded to a new, large building with abundant outdoor space and wooded trails to accommodate continued growth. 

For all 12 of next year’s kindergarteners, Roots will be their first schooling experience. Unlike many of the students in the older grades — including Gallo’s daughter — who left a traditional public school for Roots, the parents of her kindergarteners knew early on that they wanted an alternative to conventional schooling for their children.

“There is a growing awareness by parents that, especially in the early grades, what is being asked of children is not developmentally appropriate,” said Gallo, explaining that the rigidity and standardization of traditional schooling prevents a more individualized, play-filled, organic approach to learning and child development. “It’s the system not the kids,” said Gallo, adding that many parents — including her and her husband — moved to this town specifically for the 

public schools. “Many of us want to believe in the public schools ideologically, but it’s just not working for some kids.” Still, Gallo is committed to forging relationships with the local public elementary school and finding ways to collaborate.

Gallo expects to grow her school to a maximum of about 60 or 70 kids over the coming years, retaining the microschool model that she thinks is so crucial to learning. She hopes to help other entrepreneurial parents and teachers open microschools similar to Roots in their own neighborhoods. “Being super big defeats the purpose of what we’re doing. I like knowing each kid and their families. The family relationships are so important,” she said.

About 100 miles north, in rural Appleton, Adrienne Hofmann is also focused on creating an intentionally small, relationship-based, outdoor-focused learning community. 

A former public school teacher in Texas who is also a certified teacher in the state of Maine, Hofmann became more familiar with homeschooling and alternative education during the pandemic. She began formulating her vision for , a newly-licensed, forest-filled early childhood program. “Before this venture, nearly every program I worked for didn’t feel quite right, leaving me yearning for something more fulfilling,” Hofmann told me when I visited her program’s lovely yurt site. “This journey inspired me to create a supportive and nurturing environment initially designed for homeschooling families and now geared toward those seeking a nature and play-based experience, reminiscent of our own childhoods.” 

Located on an off-the-grid, 18-acre parcel, Nature Play All Day will open this fall, enabling children from ages two to six to spend all day outside, playing freely, with no top-down impositions on their learning. Access is crucial for Hofmann, and Maine’s child care subsidies will enable more families to choose her program.

Like all of the founders and educators I met during my Maine visit, Hofmann believes that we are only at the beginning of a growing movement toward smaller, simpler, more holistic educational models. Prompted by the pandemic, more parents and teachers are now seeking and building homespun alternatives to conventional schooling. 

“I like to think that one of the best things to come out of COVID is just how simple things can be,” said Hofmann. 

The Alaska Supreme Court hearing the state’s appeal to a court case that struck down key components of its correspondence school program before the end of June.

Oral arguments would be held June 25, five days before the end of on the lower court’s ruling.

Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman ruled that allowed public funds, in the form of per student allotments, to be spent at private and religious organizations in violation of the state constitution. Attorneys for the state appealed the decision last week.

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The court date comes as lawmakers seek statutory fixes to stabilize correspondence programs for the families that use them.

and take different tacks, however. HB 400 instructs the governor’s appointees on the state’s Board of Education and Early Development to find a constitutional solution and its language leaves the door open to a constitutional amendment. SB 266 repeals the language Zeman found unconstitutional and tightens restrictions on how families spend and districts report state education dollars. It would also make it tougher for parents to opt out of standardized academic testing for their children.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy has signaled that he would not allow a legislative fix to become law before the Supreme Court’s decision. Any decision would come after the end of the regular legislative session on May 15. Dunleavy has suggested a special session of the Alaska Legislature may be necessary to respond.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com. Follow Alaska Beacon on and .

AUSTIN, Texas — In rural Texas, public schools are the cultural heart of small towns. People pack the high school stadium for Friday night football games, and FFA classes prepare the next generation for the agricultural life. In many places, more people work for the school district than for any other employer.

For years, many rural Texas school districts, often barely scraping by on lean operating budgets, have relied on their local representatives in the Republican-led state legislature to fend off school voucher programs. Some of these GOP lawmakers, along with many of their liberal colleagues from larger cities, have argued that giving families taxpayer dollars to send their children to private schools or to educate them at home would drain money from the public schools.

That wall of resistance is now on the verge of collapse, thanks to a multimillion-dollar political offensive led by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and heavily funded by billionaire out-of-state allies committed to spreading school choice nationwide.

Six of the Republican House members Abbott targeted for opposing his school choice initiative were defeated in the March 5 primary election, and four others were thrown into a May runoff. Abbott said last week that his side is within two votes of enacting a school choice program in Texas.

“Even individuals who voted against school choice who won need to rethink their position in light of Abbott’s success on the issue,” said Matt Rinaldi, outgoing chair of the Texas Republican Party. “It’s sure to pass after these election results.”

Similar dynamics have been on display over the past two years in other states where rural opponents, sometimes aligned with labor groups and teachers unions, have sought unsuccessfully to head off the widening push. School choice can come through vouchers, refundable tax credits or education savings accounts.

In Arkansas, lawmakers sent  to Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders last year for her signature after proponents overcame years of opposition from rural Republicans allied with Democrats.

In Oklahoma, Tom Newell, a former Republican state legislator who works for a  that advocates for school choice, said rural resistance has steadily diminished in that state, too, enabling lawmakers to equip parents with education tax credits that became effective this year.

Rural Texas educators who have long opposed school choice are now bracing for it. “We really are the heart, soul and backbone of Texas,” said Randy Willis, executive director of the Texas Association of Rural School Districts, which has long opposed school choice. “We’re going to be left with a lot less resources as this progresses and goes through.”

In the small Texas Panhandle community of Booker, which has two blinking traffic lights and is closer to Cheyenne, Wyoming, than the state capital of Austin, school Superintendent Mike Lee has similar concerns.

“In all likelihood, that makes it where Abbott could pass vouchers,” Lee said of the primary election results.

Like many other rural school leaders, Lee said any loss of funding would make it even harder for his district to pay for basic operations and new, state-mandated safety programs launched in response to school shootings.

Primary battles

Despite the concerns of school officials such as Willis and Lee, school choice proponents say the rapid spread of the concept in Texas and other states dismantles the perception that rural residents oppose it.

“There’s been a myth in Texas that rural Republicans do not want school choice,” said Genevieve Collins, state director of the Texas branch of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political advocacy group. Voters “put that myth to bed” in the recent Republican primary, she told Stateline.

Abbott said during a speech last week that parents frequently approached him on the campaign trail “begging” and “pleading” for school choice. “Any Republican House member who was voting against school choice was voting against the voice of the Republicans who voted in that primary,” he said.

School choice advocates argue that giving families public education dollars to pay for private school allows everybody — not just the wealthy — to choose the school that is best for their child. Though most Republicans support school choice and most Democrats oppose it, the issue doesn’t break cleanly along party lines: Just as some rural Republicans oppose vouchers, some Black and Hispanic Democrats support them, arguing that families should have an alternative if their local public schools are substandard.

“When you look at this, you can see that the majority of parents want school choice. They just want to be empowered with the decisions of their children’s future,” Hillary Hickland, a mother of four who defeated Republican incumbent state Rep. Hugh Shine of Temple, said of the primary results. Shine was one of 21 Republicans who voted to take vouchers out of the education bill last year,  to The Texas Tribune, and the governor endorsed Hickland.

“I think the arguments against school choice are based in fear and control. Ultimately, we have to do what’s best for the students. That’s the purpose of education,” said Hickland, who added: “For the majority of families, public school will always be right and best, and that’s great. We’re not giving up on our public schools.”

Janis Holt, a former teacher in the Silsbee Independent School District northeast of Houston, defeated incumbent Republican state Rep. Ernest Bailes, another voucher opponent who earned Abbott’s ire. Holt said she is reassuring rural superintendents in her district that she is a staunch supporter of both public school funding and school choice.

“We’re going to make sure that we protect the students that will be in our public schools, our teachers and administrators, but will also give parents opportunities to get their kids out of a failing school when they need to,” Holt said.

Republican state Rep. Gary VanDeaver, one of the House members targeted by Abbott, hasn’t wavered from his opposition to school choice initiatives. VanDeaver survived in the first primary round on March 5 but wound up in a May 28 runoff against an opponent backed by the governor.

“I’m just going to try to dodge all the bombs that are dropped on me and keep working to get a positive message out there and make sure everybody understands what’s at stake,” said VanDeaver, a former school superintendent.

He fears Abbott’s school choice drive will redirect billions of dollars a year from rural Texas school districts to urban and suburban ones. “The economies of the small communities are struggling as it is,” he said. “There’s just a lot of reasons that something like this is bad for rural Texas.”

Rapid spread

School choice programs have spread rapidly in recent years, aided by groups such as the American Federation for Children, which was founded by the billionaire family of former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Americans for Prosperity, affiliated with the conservative billionaire Koch family.

“Nationally we really saw that momentum take off a couple of years ago,” said Chantal Lovell of EdChoice, a nonprofit group that tracks and promotes school choice. “After 2023 there was no stopping it, and it’s clear that universal educational choice isn’t a fleeting trend, but here to stay.”

As many as 73 programs have been implemented in 32 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, including 11 with a comprehensive statewide reach and 62 that serve various portions of the population, according to EdChoice.

Alabama Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed a program into law earlier this month, and a bill is awaiting the governor’s signature in Wyoming.

Texas emerged as the most closely watched school choice battleground after Abbott last year made the issue one of his top priorities and called repeated special sessions in an attempt to overcome opposition from a coalition of rural Republicans aligned with Democrats.

Abbott unleashed millions of dollars from his campaign funds and traveled into the home counties of resistant Republicans after a school choice initiative collapsed in the Texas House.

Other dynamics were also at work, including endorsements by former President Donald Trump, who has equated school choice with civil rights, and Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, who sought to settle scores against House members for initiating an unsuccessful effort to oust him through impeachment.

Big money

An avalanche of campaign dollars from both inside and outside the state helped propel Abbott’s offensive, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit research organization that tracks political spending.

Billionaire Jeff Yass, a megadonor investor based in Pennsylvania and one of the nation’s leading school choice advocates,  the governor’s campaign more than $6 million, which Abbott officials described as the “largest single donation in Texas history.”

Abbott, who is not up for reelection until 2026, was one of the biggest spenders in the undertaking, drawing $6.4 million from his campaign fund to help finance opposition expenditures against incumbents on his hit list.

The AFC Victory Fund, a super PAC the American Federation for Children created in September, directed its resources into 20 Republican primary races in Texas, opposing 13 Republican incumbents, supporting six others and financing a 20th candidate for an open seat, according to Scott Jensen, a former Wisconsin House speaker who is now a senior adviser to the American Federation for Children.

For many of the targeted legislators, the political attack was insurmountable. “We gave it everything we had, but you can’t overcome being outspent over 4-to-1,” said Republican state Rep. Travis Clardy, who lost to Joanne Shofner, former president of the Nacogdoches County Republican Women.

“We spent more money in this campaign than all my other campaigns combined,” said Clardy, a Nacogdoches attorney who first won election in 2012. “But the money aligned against us and the power and political clout behind it were too much.”

Among other things, targeted incumbents said, the AFC Victory Fund financed a bombardment of mailings and ads that often went beyond school choice to focus on other issues, such as being lax on border security. One mailing was fashioned like a wanted poster.

Republican state Rep. Drew Darby, who prevailed over his challenger and doesn’t have a Democratic opponent, said the tactics were out of bounds and called Abbott’s involvement in his race “sad” for the state. “That’s a situation I’ve never seen in my political career,” said Darby.

Jensen said the AFC Victory Fund spent almost $4 million in Texas and plans to spend $15 million nationally on state school choice campaigns during the 2024 election cycle.

“Welcome to politics,” Jensen said of the criticism from targeted lawmakers. “These guys are long-term incumbents. I’m sorry if they haven’t been in a tough race for a while, but everything we said was accurate. And I don’t think any of it was misleading or unfair.”

At least 70% of the AFC Victory Fund’s communications, he said, focused on school choice.

In the Robert Lee Independent School District in West Texas, which has one campus and about 250 students, Superintendent Aaron Hood fears the potential impact on his district.

As with other districts, inflation has put a whammy on operating expenses, leaving Robert Lee with a budget deficit for the second year in a row. And because state funding is based on average daily attendance, if any students were to transfer to a private school under a school choice plan, Robert Lee would face a drop in state funds. (The nearest private school is 30 miles away, in San Angelo.)

For now, Hood says, it’s a bit too early to assess the potential impact of the primary results. But if Abbott prevails in the next round of electoral combat, he said, “then I would say that choice is coming to Texas.”

Jimmy Cloutier of OpenSecrets provided data on campaign contributions and expenditures for this article.

This story was originally published by , which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on  and .

Small is scalable.

In addition to their small size, microschools are also usually low-cost, highly personalized learning programs, often with a creative curriculum and supple scheduling. They were gaining momentum pre-pandemic and took off following COVID school closures and prolonged remote learning. As someone who has been following alternative education trends for years, I suspected microschooling — and its cousin, homeschooling — would remain above pre-pandemic levels even after schools returned to normal. But I have been pleasantly surprised to see a continued acceleration of these programs in many areas of the country.

Tennessee is a case in point. I recently visited five microschools and related learning models around Nashville and Chattanooga. All of them have launched in the past four years and most opened within the past two years. Their enrollment is quickly rising, and some have already hit capacity with long waitlists. Demand for these start-up schools shows no signs of slowing.

The oldest of the programs I visited opened in August 2020. Located on an organic farm in Smyrna, Tennessee, about 20 miles outside of Nashville, began with one teacher and five homeschooled children, including farmer Lauren Palmer’s own five-year-old. By January 2021, the program had 30 children and two teachers. Today, it is a Reggio Emilia-inspired K-5 farm school, with additional parent-child programming for littler ones, that serves 86 children. 

Blending core academics and interest-driven learning, along with abundant outside time and opportunities to help with farm duties, the farm school is currently at maximum enrollment, with dozens of children on a waitlist. All of the children are recognized homeschoolers, with most attending two to three days a week. The full-time, five-day option costs $900/month. “For the majority of our families, COVID was the catalyst to them beginning their homeschooling journey,” said Kaiti Dewhirst, Bloomsbury Farm’s Director of Education. She says now these families don’t want their children in a conventional classroom. “They see the farm school as an opportunity to preserve childhood wonder.” Dewhirst and her team are in the planning stages of determining how to extend their program to middle school and beyond, as well as serve more families on the waitlist.

In Franklin, another Nashville suburb, opened its doors as a recognized private school in fall 2021 with over 40 learners, including toddlers to fifth graders. Today, it has nearly 100 students and 16 staff members. Founders Greg and Jennifer Biorkman never expected to own a school. Both have backgrounds in business and sales and were working full-time jobs when COVID hit and disrupted the education of their two young boys. They decided to create their ideal learning environment with trained Montessori teachers and a focus on child-centered learning. 

“We truly could not find a school we wanted to send our children to,” said Jennifer. “It was simple supply and demand.” Last year, Greg left his corporate job to oversee Harpeth Montessori full time, and is planning to expand the program to middle schoolers in the fall while managing a growing waitlist. 

“This community is very open to alternatives to conventional education but there are not a lot of options,” he said, acknowledging that there is a lot of opportunity for other entrepreneurial parents and teachers to launch small schools.

Further south, the Chattanooga area has some of the newest microschools and related learning models in the state. In fall 2022, Rebecca Ellis opened in Chattanooga with 32 K-6 students. A Charlotte Mason-inspired hybrid homeschool program, Canyon Creek learners attend full-time classes three days a week focused on core academics and deep nature study, while working through curriculum at home on the remaining two days. Today, Canyon Creek Christian Academy has more than 50 learners with five full-time teachers and additional part-time instructors. 

The Academy recently leased additional church space next door to continue to accommodate its growing enrollment. “We are getting more kids trying to pull out of the public school system,” said Ellis, who says her program’s low-stress, child-focused environment is appealing to parents — especially those whose children are growing anxious in test-heavy conventional schools. Canyon Creek’s low annual tuition, currently set at $3,750, is also attractive, costing significantly less than other local private schools.

Just a few miles down the road in Chattanooga, also opened in fall 2022. Founded by Rachel Good, who worked as a public school teacher in Washington and Tennessee for over eight years, Discovery Learners’ Academy, is a state-recognized private school with a personalized educational approach that opened with 21 learners and today has 50 — about 15 of whom attend part-time as homeschoolers. Half of all the school’s students are neurodiverse, a population that Good caters to as a former special education teacher. Indeed, her inability to fully serve special needs students in the conventional school system was one of the reasons she left the public schools. “I was always trying to advocate for these kids and was always hitting a brick wall,” said Good.

At $7,000 a year, Discovery Learners’ Academy is about half the cost of most traditional private schools in the area, and less than the $10,850 a year that the local Hamilton County public schools per student. Even so, tuition is still financially out-of-reach for many families, and the school currently doesn’t qualify for the state’s small education choice program. “It’s so heartbreaking when a parent asks if they can use their voucher here and I have to say no,” said Good, who is supportive of current efforts by Tennessee lawmakers to expand school choice policies.

The newest microschool I visited in the Volunteer State opened in August in Cleveland, just outside of Chattanooga. is a home-based learning pod for homeschoolers that is part of the fast-growing Acton Academy network that includes more than 300 independently-operated, learner-driven microschools, serving thousands of students. 

In spring 2023, Alexis and JT Rubatsky listened to a podcast with Acton Academy co-founder, Jeff Sandefer, explaining the philosophy of learner-driven education where young people are empowered to pursue their passions while mastering core curriculum content. They were hooked, and knew immediately that it was the type of education they wanted for their two boys, ages six and 11. “Our kids weren’t thriving in school, and as a teacher, I saw that there was so much focus on the tests, on shoving information down their throats,” said Alexis, who quit her job teaching high school biology in the local public schools to open Triumph. The year started with five learners, including the Rubatskys’ two boys. Half-way through their first year, enrollment has more than doubled to 11 learners and the founders know it won’t be long before they outgrow their home-based classroom for a larger space.

“I would love for there to be lots of options,” said Alexis, who is encouraged by the growth of microschools and related models in Tennessee and across the U.S. She is already connecting with local founders like Rachel Good, who is working to build community among the entrepreneurial parents and teachers who are creating these new options. Working collaboratively, these small schools can have an even greater impact.

“I want to support these innovative educators,” said Good. “We need to have that variety of options.”

One of the first self-directed learning centers for homeschoolers, or what today we might call a microschool, opened just outside of Philadelphia in 1978. has grown and flourished over the past four decades and inspired the creation in 2016 of , a microschool in the Germantown section of Philadelphia that embraces non-coercive, self-directed education for homeschoolers of all ages who attend the center several days a week. 

When I visited Natural Creativity in the winter of 2018, it had about 20 learners in a bright but cramped section of a local church. Now, Natural Creativity has 50 learners ages 4 to 18 in a large, loft-style building a few blocks away from its previous location. Krystal Dillard joined Natural Creativity as co-director in 2020 after seeing a about the center and its embrace of unschooling and self-directed education principles. “I have a Master’s degree in education and never heard about this idea,” said Dillard, who taught in public schools in Fairfax County, Virginia and in an inner-city charter school in Los Angeles before moving to Philadelphia and working as a literacy coach in the Philadelphia Public Schools. “There was so much violence and trauma in the schools here,” said Dillard, who began to feel that education could and should look different. When she discovered Natural Creativity, it showed her what was possible. 

The story was similar for David O’Connor. He was teaching theater courses at the University of Pennsylvania when he and a group of parents learned about (ALCs), a global network of microschools and self-directed learning communities. The parents had been inspired by the educational philosophy of the , a Sudbury-model school that opened in 2011, but they gravitated to the tools and practices of the ALC approach. The group launched in 2018 with 20 learners in a church basement. 

Today, 50 learners of all ages learn together in a spacious building in Philadelphia’s Bella Vista neighborhood, with a second location at the Awbury Arboretum. 

“What shocked me the most at the university level was how much my students had to unlearn in order to have the curiosity again to learn new things,” said Philly ALC staff member, Jessie Dern-Sisco, who taught college students at Villanova University for several years during and after receiving a Ph.D. in philosophy there. “Here, we don’t have that problem.”

“A lot more families are looking for something like this,” added O’Connor, who explained that about 16 of the current learners attend Philly ALC as full-time recognized private school students, while the rest attend part-time as homeschoolers several days a week. Tuition is pay-what-you-can and accessibility is a key priority. O’Connor said the average family is paying about $7,000 per learner, with the maximum annual tuition at $11,000. Fundraising and philanthropy, such as the microgrant Philly ALC and other local microschools received from the , help to make these programs even more affordable to more families—especially in a state like Pennsylvania that has minimal education choice policies. 
It was a VELA grant that helped Lauren Umlauf and Hannah Mackay to grow their program, build community, and begin to find ways to help other prospective founders launch similar spaces in their own neighborhoods. Previously part of the Philly ALC community, Mackay and Umlauf spun-off their self-directed learning center, , in a separate neighborhood where they now serve 18 learners ages 5 to 12, with plans to create a teen program. Both former public school teachers, Mackay and Umlauf wanted a radically different approach to teaching and learning for their own children and others in their community. They piloted their program outside in a public park in 2021 and opened the doors to their dedicated space in a bright and colorful building in South Philly in fall 2023. In addition to The Dandelion Project’s three-day program for homeschoolers, it also offers afterschool programming and vacation and summer camps for local youth.

Beyond Self-Directed Education

While the City of Brotherly Love has seen escalating interest in low-cost, self-directed learning models like those described above, I was particularly pleased to see the growth of other alternative education models that embrace different learning philosophies while placing children first. A diverse, dynamic ecosystem of decentralized education options enables families to find the learning environment that best meets their distinct needs and preferences.

Some of that growth has occurred as a result of the pandemic response and prolonged remote schooling that led parents to consider — or create — new educational options. That was how came to be. A local mother of four children began offering a space in her home for local families who removed their children from school in 2020. That evolved into an established non-profit learning cooperative that centers the experience of Black and Brown homeschooling families. Since fall 2023, learners meet up to four days a week in a warm, welcoming storefront location, tucked along a quiet, brick street in Germantown. 

“The model of traditional schooling doesn’t fit with kids’ desire to move and have a voice in their day and in their learning,” said Jasmine Miller, a mother of three who helps to lead Koku-Roko. Miller was drawn to homeschooling but wanted something more collaborative. As a learning center for homeschoolers with hired educators, Koku-Roko enables Miller and the other founding parents to continue to work as full-time professionals, while taking turns being on-site to help steward their center, which emphasizes family-focused, child-led, project-based learning.

Miller explained that Koku-Roko’s founding parents actively sought a location for their co-op in the largely African American Germantown neighborhood in order to be closest to the families they serve. That was the same catalyst for Imani Jackson and Kareem Rogers, two educators currently working in a traditional private school in Philadelphia who are opening Poinciana Montessori this fall in Germantown. Part of the fast-growing microschool network that emphasizes affordability, equity, and an inclusive, culturally-responsive learning environment, Poinciana will be the second Wildflower elementary microschool in the city, following in the footsteps of Hyacinth Montessori that launched in West Philadelphia in fall 2022.

Philadelphia resident Sunny Greenberg works for the Wildflower network helping to support new and prospective microschool founders. She sees rising interest in microschooling, both in her city and nationwide. “Microschools like Wildflower can meet children where they are more quickly and pivot when necessary,” she said. “Because of their size, it is easier to build community and the sense of belonging that can be missing in larger school settings.”

It’s breathtaking to witness the expansion of affordable, learner-centered education options in Philadelphia in just six years. Not only have the microschools I visited in 2018 grown in size and space, they have helped to lay a foundation for education innovation throughout the city. 

As Madeleine Nutting, co-founder of Hyacinth Montessori, told me: “The school I wanted to teach at didn’t exist.” Like so many other entrepreneurial parents and teachers in Philadelphia and beyond, she built what she couldn’t find.

Jon and Sam Bastianelli looked on patiently as their oldest son, the “history buff,” examined the axes, shovels and old farming tools displayed in a blacksmith shop at the Coachella Valley History Museum.

His younger siblings crushed pumpkin seeds with a mortar and pestle in an exhibit honoring the Cahuilla tribe, the first inhabitants of the region. Then they all listened as a volunteer explained the inner workings of a washing machine from 1910.

This wasn’t just a quick detour during their family vacation. You could call it homeschooling, but home in this case is a customized Country Coach RV with a bunk room for the kids  — and school is wherever they choose to go next.

The Bastianellis are among a growing number of families who don’t let having school-age children get in the way of seeing the U.S. — or even the world. These “roadschoolers” say their well-traveled kids are getting far more knowledge and real-life experience than they ever could from a book, a computer or even a typical classroom teacher. 

“You get sights, sounds and smells — all the things your memory works on at the same time,” Jon said. Cultural visits like this one typically lead to a “rabbit hole of questions” later, Sam added.

Led by remote workers who took social distancing to the extreme, during the height of the pandemic. But these buyers differed from the empty-nesters and retirees that long defined this subculture. The newbees are younger — — and more . These mobile families include a mix of traditional homeschoolers and newcomers who pulled up stakes during COVID. In fact, with to pre-pandemic levels, are counting on this budding customer base for future growth. 

“This has always been an older generation, and now it’s become our generation,” said Christian Axness, 37, who left Sarasota, Florida, behind in 2017 with her husband and two children, 2 and 4 at the time. Last year, she co-founded Republic of Nomads with Stephanie Simpson, a former private school teacher from Indiana, where . They plan group outings like the museum visit so parents don’t have to do it on their own.

Over the past year, they’ve organized trips to the Black Hills of South Dakota to study Native American culture and to Bend, Oregon, to hike around the of an ancient volcano where lava flowed a thousand years ago.

With a combined 18 years as “fulltimers” — as those who live out of their vehicles call themselves — Axness and Simpson negotiate reduced homeschooling rates for participants at national parks and museums. Some of their events are free, while a weeklong camping adventure under the stars might run around $300. In 2022, they rented an observatory in Joshua Tree where students talked to local astronomers. In January, they took off for Baja, California, to pack in Spanish lessons, oceanography and windsurfing.

SLIDESHOW

Learning on the Road

“These are not just surface-level experiences,” Axness said, “but immersive events because of the nature of our lifestyles.”

While a non-stop road trip might sound lavish, it doesn’t have to be. Full-time RVers range from families who aim to live those who drive six-figure luxury vehicles. For many families, monthly living expenses are about the same as if they lived at home, said Tiffany Johnsrud, a mom of three from Dubuque, Iowa.

“We’re not spending money on soccer and softball,” she said. “We’re spending it on experiences.” 

‘Lifestyle change’

The RV Industry Association started to pay more attention to roadschoolers in the fall of 2020, when more than half of the nation’s schools offered only remote learning. Its biannual survey showed that 45% of RVers were also educating children. 

Drawing on this growing segment of the RV population, Fulltime Families, a membership organization, has a for roadschoolers. And Kay Akpan, a Black roadschooling mom with a large Instagram following, and launched a Facebook page to connect Black families trading daily carpool lines for interstate rest areas. RV Industry Association that among new buyers, 14% are Black, more than double the rate before COVID.

“There are people who are making more of this lifestyle change,” said Monika Geraci, spokeswoman for the association. “It’s not just a pandemic thing.”

When Dubuque schools shut down because of COVID, Johnsrud called it a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to tour the country. Fourteen-year-old Miley, the oldest kid in the family, was a bit skeptical.

“I thought it was a joke at first,” she said.

But their family of five had previously discussed moving into a tiny house, so getting one with wheels wasn’t a stretch.

Miley had no qualms about leaving. “I hated online school.” She said she learns more from books than virtual programs. But as a roadschooler, she gains much of her knowledge first hand.

“I can tell you facts about the cities, what there is to do there and the campground names,” she said. Her favorite excursion so far was to Oregon, where she tried “cold plunging” in freezing rivers. “We’ve seen so many waterfalls. The forests they have are just really pretty.” 

Other families took to the road long before COVID. Victor and Robyn Robledo ran a gymnastics studio near San Diego, but sensed that many of the parents and children they served were stressed out. In 2015, they escaped that world and moved into their 30-foot class C rig. The family traveled through Europe and the U.S. — hiking, skiing, blogging and nurturing an adventurous spirit in their five children, who at the time ranged from 3 to 14. 

Robyn, who has always homeschooled, covers core subjects, but mostly takes a “free-flowing” approach to her children’s education. One son wanted to learn everything he could about dogs. Her more entrepreneurial daughter their “,” offering apparel, virtual coaching and wellness courses. The middle daughter is a charcoal artist and teaches a mindfulness class for kids.

“The big hurdle for me was overcoming this fear that if my child doesn’t do traditional curriculum, how will they get into college,” Robyn said. She said her two youngest, now 12 and 15, “can’t do algebra” — a missing skill that would alarm traditionalists. But she doesn’t care. What’s important to her is that they work as part of a team and develop communication and problem-solving skills. “The ability to learn is more important than what you’re learning.”

Others take a more conventional approach. Axness estimated that about half the students in Republic of Nomads are also enrolled in . 

Erica Pickett, a former Hartford County, Maryland, elementary school teacher, “launched out” with her family in 2022. She purchased a literature-based curriculum for her son and twin daughters that features some of the same books she used as a teacher. But they’re also regulars of the National Park Service’s free program, where students earn badges based on activities at the park or historical site they’re visiting. 

“If I have to put them in public schools, I don’t want them to be blown out of the water,” she said. “I know for sure my kids aren’t missing anything.”

Leaving the road

Most roadschoolers say they periodically check in to see whether their children still prefer the itinerant lifestyle. Some make it obvious they’re ready for a change.

After trekking through the nation’s wide-open spaces for the past seven years, 11-year-old Eloise Ridley longed for the four walls of a traditional classroom. Her father, Kevin, persuaded her to spend another year traveling by offering a winter at Disney World. But last year, they permanently parked their RV and enrolled Eloise and her 7-year-old sister Eliza at Pagosa Elementary in southwest Colorado. 

“We don’t run a totalitarian dictatorship,” Kevin joked. “We let them participate in the family decisions.”

Prior to ending their travels, didn’t just go from one campground to the next. They were “boondockers,” living off-grid and relying on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network to work online and connect their daughters to Florida Virtual School. Now the girls ride a school bus and bring classmates home for sleepovers. 

For their parents, settling down was a sacrifice. They were “ambassadors” for Republic of Nomads and hosted an event for a couple dozen families in Baja last winter. 

“Would Kevin and I rather be sitting on a beach right now? Probably,” said Emma. “But our kids come home everyday with big smiles on their faces.”

Others who left the road behind said it took just a few months before RV living — and the friendships they’d formed — called them back. 

Those tight bonds were apparent on a recent evening at the Thousand Trails campground just off I-10 in Palm Springs. In a large clubhouse, several Republic of Nomad families gathered for a pre-Thanksgiving potluck. Parents sampled vegetable side dishes and pumpkin pie while children chased each other, played dominoes and jumped in the pool. 

Many of these families travel together, creating a community of friends that’s not unlike what their children would enjoy in a normal neighborhood. Miley, the Iowa ninth-grader, also earns money babysitting and tutoring younger children from another family.

She’s still in touch with friends back home, but isn’t longing to return. Unless you count the one-room schoolhouse from 1909 at the Coachella museum, she and her siblings haven’t been in a traditional classroom since 2020. She even has plans to “move out” into her own van at 18 and keep traveling. She marveled at how much of the country she’s seen in four years.

“Until fifth grade,” she said, “I didn’t know there was any other state than Iowa.”

A bill to allow home-educated students to participate in Missouri public school activities is back for the upcoming legislative session — and has been coupled with provisions rolling back state oversight of homeschooling families.

Sen. Ben Brown, a Washington Republican, pre-filed a 52-page bill that largely resembles the version he sponsored that cleared the Senate last session.

While it initially was only two pages and focused on giving homeschool kids the opportunity to play sports and join clubs in public schools, it now would add a new category for home-educated students and rescind attendance officers’ authority over homeschool families.

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“As a former athlete myself whose childhood was greatly impacted by my participation in the sport of wrestling, I feel strongly that it is wrong to deny these potentially life-changing opportunities to children,” Brown told the Senate Education and Workforce Development Committee during a March hearing.

The Missouri State High School Activities Association policy is to allow homeschooled students to participate in their local school districts’ sports if they are enrolled in at least one credit hour of instruction, which is typically two classes in non-block-scheduled schools. School districts are allowed to be more restrictive and ban homeschool participation.

Brown’s bill would prohibit schools from requiring enrollment in classes, but any instruction or training required for the club or sport would still be allowed.

No one testified in opposition to the bill in March, but that was expanded to remove local oversight of homeschooling families.

Oversight

State Rep. Maggie Nurrenbern, a Kansas City Democrat, said what concerns her about the legislation is “simply not knowing which students are being homeschooled.”

“It’s imperative… that when parents make the decision to homeschool their child, we have some reporting procedures in place so that we know which students are actually being homeschooled,” she said in an interview with The Independent.

The bill would remove a section of state law that says families “may provide…  a declaration of enrollment stating their intent for the child to attend a home school” to the local school district or the county recorder of deeds.

Kim Quon, a regional director for the Missouri homeschool advocacy organization Families for Home Education, told The Independent that the statute’s wording “causes confusion for everybody.”

She said the declaration of enrollment is optional because the law says they “may provide” that document. Quon recommends families notify a school in writing if a child is homeschooled, but some have felt obligated to do this by school administrators.

The bill also would rescind a law allowing attendance officers to investigate compliance with the state’s . The law requires home schools to offer at least 1,000 hours of instruction, with at least 600 of those in core subjects like reading and math.

Quon said families document their hours of learning but do not submit that information for review.

“We don’t submit our hours,” she said. “It’s not anybody’s business.”

She is also opposed to attendance officers checking on homeschooling families, saying: “There just doesn’t need to be that level of scrutiny.”

School attendance officers and the Department of Social Services’s Children’s Division can assess whether a child is being neglected after being removed from public school.

found that 36% of families that pulled their children out of public school in a three-year period had at least one accepted report of child abuse or neglect. A majority had multiple reports of abuse or neglect.

Quon said the Children’s Division could still investigate instances of neglect, but she is worried attendance officers may abuse their power.

The Independent asked if she heard of attendance officers investigating families that are tracking hours and homeschooling.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not aware of this happening too terribly much. But the fact that it’s there leaves that option for anybody to do that.”

Homeschooled athletes

Quon said homeschooling families have different reactions to the idea of their kids in public-school sports and clubs.

Some value the privacy of being detached from the school district while others desire access to the amenities their tax dollars help pay for.

Brown’s bill could help alleviate some homeschooling families’ privacy concerns, said Zeke Spieker, legislative assistant to Sen. Jill Carter, a Republican from Granby. Carter testified in favor of Brown’s bill in March.

“There’s always a concern that when you give school students access to these activities that there are going to be some strings attached that would cause a loss of homeschool freedom,” Spieker said. “So last year, in an effort to try to assuage some of those concerns, they created the FLEX category.”

Brown’s bill calls for the defining of “FLEX schools,” or family-led educational experience schools. The differences between FLEX students and homeschool students are that FLEX students can participate in public-school activities and obtain K-12 scholarships through the state’s MOScholars tax-credit program.

Spieker, who was homeschooled himself, said some homeschooling families are still concerned about the FLEX language.

He and his family have talked with home educators for years and made trips to the Missouri Capitol to ask for the ability to play in public school sports.

Spieker said he’s watched opportunities for homeschooled children grow during his family’s advocacy. His brother Jonah, a high-school senior, was homeschooled but played on Webb City’s football team.

Quon said the bill could benefit students further away from Missouri’s major cities the most, where there aren’t many options outside of public school activities.

She said the Families for Home Education’s position on the legislation is “neutral as long as nobody does anything crazy with the bill.”

Last legislative session, the bill expanded in a House committee to include provisions about four-day school weeks, school board vacancies, foster-child enrollment and other education matters. It was never debated on the House floor.

Nurrenbern said the amendments will likely determine the bill’s fate.

“There will be hopefully some good amendments that can be attached to this and make it,” she said. “If there’s more good than bad in the bill, I think it will pass.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on and .

“COVID put things under a microscope,” said Amber Okolo-Ebube, a Texas homeschooling mother. “Parents saw how far behind their children actually were and said I can do this better.” Okolo-Ebube has been homeschooling her children since 2011, but she has seen the local homeschooling population swell over the past three years, especially among families of color.

Okolo-Ebube is one of the hundreds of entrepreneurial parents and teachers I have interviewed over the past three years who are creating low-cost alternatives to conventional schooling. In 2022, she founded Leading Little Arrows, a weekly homeschool co-op that grew so quickly she decided to lease a building near the University of Texas at Arlington to accommodate weekly tutorials with hired educators and a part-time, drop-off microschool for homeschoolers. 

With nearly 40 learners, three-quarters of whom are neurodiverse, Okolo-Ebube’s programs are already at capacity. She plans to open two additional microschool locations later this fall.

“The homeschooling movement is accelerating here, particularly among BIPOC families,” said Okolo-Ebube, referring to Black, Indigenous, and other students of color. “You see someone like you doing it and it becomes less scary.” 

Angela Watson, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, theorizes that these network effects are contributing to the growth in homeschooling among families of color. “Minority families have begun to network as homeschoolers, something that white homeschoolers have done for decades. We think these grassroots support systems serve to expand homeschool participation in these populations,” she said, explaining that more research is needed. 

Homeschooling in 2020, with Black homeschooling numbers rising five-fold that year, according to the US Census Bureau. Their May 2023 Household Pulse Survey showed that the homeschooling rate dipped from its pandemic peak but remains elevated at over 5% of the U.S. school-age population, or more than 3.5 million students. 

Watson is part of a team at Johns Hopkins that is creating a free hub for research and data on homeschooling. She sees many reasons for homeschooling’s continued popularity, including a greater openness among today’s younger parents to nontraditional learning options. “This generation of parents is more willing to try something new,” said Watson. “They grew up when homeschooling was more mainstream and is less stigmatized in their view than it may be to older parents. It could also be that younger parents are more tech-savvy and adept at online learning.”

Other reasons that families may choose homeschooling are disappointment with the academic or social environment in local public schools and a lack of accessible private school options, as well as concern over curriculum, including what content is or is not covered. Some parents say they are simply disillusioned with standardized, one-size-fits-all schooling and want an alternative.

“I think more parents are realizing that compelling their kids to sit still, memorize facts, and take tests is not the surest path to success for their children,” said Jenny Markus, a homeschooling mother of a four-year-old daughter in Brooklyn who is seeing more homeschoolers in New York City. “Modern challenges call for creative minds and resilient spirits, which conventional schools do not consistently foster.” Markus just launched a self-directed learning center for homeschoolers this fall. 

New reveals that New York’s homeschooling enrollment increased 65 percent during the first two academic years of the pandemic, while in Florida, homeschooling enrollment increased by 43 percent. Florida’s homeschooling population continued to climb last year as well, according to state .

“This movement is just beginning,” said Okolo-Ebube, who believes that more families will flock to homeschooling and schooling alternatives, such as microschooling, over the coming years. With the national expansion of school choice policies that enable families to use education funds toward an assortment of approved expenses, including homeschooling program fees and microschool tuition in some states, access to these out-of-system models will become even greater.

Parents increasingly want a wider variety of education options from which to choose, including unconventional ones that are more tailored to their children’s specific needs and interests. More everyday entrepreneurs like Okolo-Ebube and Markus are responding to this parent demand by building innovative and affordable schooling alternatives that families want.

“Having gone through the New York City public school system myself, I never felt like I truly had enough time and space to pursue my curiosity and passions at my own pace,” said Markus. “For my own child, I knew I wanted something that provided more freedom and flexibility, and I am as excited as ever to continue on this path with other families who value the same kinds of experiences for their children.”

Watching her older brother lead a math club from the front porch of her family’s quaint coastal home in the Dominican Republic helped foster Rosa Aristy’s love for STEM education as a child.  

Like her brother, Aristy grew up surrounded by family members who taught her the value of investing in others — a commitment she now makes to not only the students in her kids’ homeschool co-op but also their parents.

“That front porch they would sit at was the very first math club I was exposed to,” Aristy told ����Ӱ��. “Seeing them laugh because they were having so much fun learning together became something I wanted to instill in others.”

Aristy’s upbringing served as the inspiration for , a Houston-based nonprofit that addresses diversity gaps in STEM education through math, robotics and coding programs for homeschool students.

Through the support of the , Bridges to Science has expanded its mission to train homeschool parents on how to teach their children math.

Today, Bridges to Science serves more than 50 homeschool students across Texas with the help of local universities, organizations and volunteers.

“It’s a very near and dear vision of mine…and the intent is to support our amazing students who have so much potential but don’t have access,” Aristy said.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: How would you say your upbringing and being a homeschool mother influenced the creation of Bridges to Science?

When we first moved to Texas, I noticed the school system was really focused on annual testing. It was beginning to rob my children of the joy of learning and I didn’t want that to happen. That was the one thing my parents in particular instilled in me and I want my kids to be lifelong learners. 

One day the moms at my children’s homeschool co-op asked the students to vote on what courses they wanted to learn. They pretty much said they wanted more coding, robotics and STEM classes. The moms and I just stared at each other wondering who would have the courage to teach these classes. No one seemed committed to doing this and I didn’t want to let our students down. I had done some programming before, not the kind they wanted to learn, but I thought that I could learn something child-friendly and get up to speed. 

But before I did that, I was aware that homeschoolers in my community use a curriculum and approach to math that’s memory-based and very common in school systems. I knew that it wasn’t giving the kids the math foundation they needed to go into the sciences. So I said, let me first start off with a math club like my brother’s growing up and once the foundation is set we can do coding next. That’s how Bridges to Science first started out. 

How has Bridges to Science supported homeschool parents teach their children math?

We just got a grant for that and we’re super excited. This summer we’re going to launch a math workshop for parents similar to the ones we have for students. We want parents to have the opportunity to interact with mathematicians and see the beauty of math because it takes a village to impact our children’s lives. If we get parents to bring down their fears about math, they’ll feel more comfortable facilitating inquiry-based sessions with their children. 

I think the stress around math roots from parents wanting to solve the problem for their students and that’s exactly what we don’t want to do. We don’t want to rob them of the joy of discovering the way out of those problems. So that’s our intent. We’re using a very solid approach that is backed by research, but we’re tailoring it to the needs of homeschool moms that is culturally relevant and through methods that respond well to their educational scenario.

What is something important to keep in mind when it comes to educating homeschooled families?

Homeschool communities have grown in its diversity and flavors. Sometimes I sense that there’s a stereotype of who we are that doesn’t really reflect who my students are. For example, we’re seeing more families from underprivileged neighborhoods try out homeschooling. And we’re seeing many single moms stepping up to homeschool their children too. They’re not doing it for any ideological reasons but really just for practicality. So I think the world needs to know that homeschooling, at least here in Houston, is a little more diverse than what you may think.

I understand that Bridges to Science is geared for underserved students — primarily Hispanic students. As a Dominican immigrant, tell me more about why it’s important for you to bridge that diversity gap in STEM education.

I like to envision my organization through a spectrum. On one end, we have our amazing students who have so much potential but don’t have access. On the other end, we have universities, organizations and corporations we work with that have an abundance of resources. We serve as the bridge to unite them so our students can see beyond their existing scenario. 

It’s a very near and dear vision of mine because, in a way, I see myself in them. I grew up in a very small town and my father passed away when I was 12. I had to grow up really fast during my middle school years and get a job to help my mom. You don’t have to go through a big transition like I did, but my life was always at a crossroads. I want our children to explore all the beautiful things they can do in STEM without worry.

You speak about your work with so much love and conviction. Where would you say this energy comes from?

It must be from my mom and dad. Both of them were passionate educators and people who invested into the lives of a lot of people — especially youth. The one thing I learned, particularly from my mom, was to love my students and see them as a whole.

As a kid, I vividly remember my mom stopping me one day from watching videos because we needed to go to someone’s house. I was a typical kid and complained and asked her why me? Why was it so important for us to be there? She told me that she noticed one of her students was sad and realized that her parents were thinking of getting a divorce. So my mom went there to act as a counselor and see if there was anything she could do to help the parents. That really spoke volumes to me. My mom had five kids but she made the time to do those kinds of things. It taught me how important it is to invest in others.

As Bridges to Science continues to expand its reach, what do you hope families take away from their experience?

Half of our students have some sort of adversity attached to them. It could either be due to race, socioeconomic or neurodivergence. When I started Bridges to Science, I set out to give our children the privileges they didn’t have access to. As I’ve invested in my students, I always tell them that they need to pay it forward. And little by little, that’s the vision we have moved towards.

Oregon’s pandemic home-schooling boom is beginning to cool off, new state data shows.

The number of students taught at home this year is down about 7.5% from last year in 14 of the state’s 19 Education Service Districts that responded to Capital Chronicle data requests and that track total home-school enrollment at the beginning of the school year. Parents who choose to home-school their kids must report their intent to do so with one of the state’s 19 regional districts, which cover all 197 school districts in the state. The service districts coordinate certain services and resources that are more cost-effective to share between multiple districts.

Home-school enrollment among those districts is still about 40% higher today than it was in 2019, before the pandemic moved classes online for over a year.

Parents don’t have to report why they are choosing to home school when they register, but Rosalyn Newhouse, a volunteer with the Oregon Homeschool Education Network, said many members of the group’s Facebook page have discussed why they haven’t sent their kids back to school.

“People who became involuntary home-schoolers during the pandemic said, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize my kid was under so much stress,’” Newhouse said. “A lot of parents are saying, ‘Actually, this has worked out really well for us and we’re going to stick with it.’”

Between 2019 and 2020, the number of students registering for home schooling in Oregon shot up about 71%, from just over 18,000 to more than 31,000.

It was part of a nationwide trend. Between the spring of 2019 and the fall of 2020, the number of students registered for home schooling across the country doubled, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Among Black and African American students, the number taught at home quintupled.

Data from 18 states analyzed recently by The Associated Press shows a slight decline in home-schooled numbers since the pandemic, about 17%, but not a return to pre-pandemic levels.

In six of the 14 districts the Capital Chronicle reviewed, the number of home-schoolers is still up 30% or more from pre-pandemic levels. In two districts — the Columbia Gorge and South Coast — the number enrolled today has sunk below pre-pandemic levels.

In Oregon, the numbers have increased the most in the most populous districts.

In the Multnomah Educational Service District, which oversees Centennial, David Douglas, Parkrose, Corbett, Gresham-Barlow, Portland Public and the Riverdale school districts, the number of home-schoolers is up about 2% this year, and remains up about 422% from pre-pandemic levels.

In 2019, 725 students in the Multnomah district were enrolled in home school. Today, about 3,800 are — nearly 4% of the district’s estimated 100,000 students.

Newhouse said the numbers tend to be highest in counties such as Washington and Multnomah where parents have more resources for home schooling.

“Where the populations are larger, there are more opportunities to hook up with other home-schoolers, so it’s easier to form a community,” she said.

Home-schooled students still make up a relatively small portion of the overall student population in the state. Even with the boom in 2020, the number enrolled in home schooling was about 5% of the state’s total student population.

Home schooling in Oregon involves little oversight. The Oregon Department of Education recommends content standards and a framework for teaching at home on its website, but parents aren’t required to use it. Students need test for comprehension in major subject areas at grades three, five, eight, and 10. When it comes to earning a diploma at graduation, it’s up to local high schools to decide whether to award one.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on and .

In 2009, the mother of five in Manassas, Virginia, began assembling a homeschool curriculum eventually named . Thirteen years later, the program now serves about 160 area students in grades K-12, who show up in uniform to a local center one day a week. 

Students partake in a variety of classes, as well as P.E., lunch, and the like. But the other four days of the week they learn at home. 

Reilly said Aquinas exploded amid COVID, after “everybody saw what we saw back in the early 2000s.” 

Since the start of the pandemic, public school enrollment has crashed — between fall 2019 and 2020, it dropped by 1.4 million students, or 3 percent, the largest single-year decline since World War II, according to released last spring. While educators are trying to figure out how to bring these families back, researchers are starting to find them persisting in unusual spaces. Many are relying on a type of homeschooling made popular when school closures became widespread in 2020.

But as Reilly’s success suggests, hybrid homeschooling has been around for decades. Now the sector even has its own , based at Kennesaw State University, northwest of Atlanta.

Eric Wearne, who founded it, began studying what he calls “hybrid” schools about seven years ago — he defines hybrids differently than most observers, not as a mix of online and live instruction, but as programs that meet in-person for fewer than five full days per week, with students typically home-schooled the rest of the week.

The schools also decide upon most or all of the curriculum, though varying levels of instruction and grading may be done by parents. And they’re more formal than learning pods or microschools. About 60 percent to 70 percent are private, according to Wearne.

He says schools like Reilly’s in Virginia are now engaging middle-class families in a different kind of school choice that’s more flexible, informal and — at $4,158 for average tuition, according to Wearne — more affordable than the typical private school.

The biggest challenge, however, may be figuring out a way to make it work more broadly for families who got with the kind of remote schooling that emerged during the pandemic — and to persuade public school advocates that it’s not eroding support or trust in traditional schooling.

A longtime school choice scholar, Wearne began getting curious about hybrid schools after he and his wife sent the oldest of their seven children to a small Catholic program. 

It served K-8 students, and when parents there began looking into starting a high school, Wearne and his wife, both high school teachers in a previous life, decided to help out. 

That was in 2012, and soon Wearne began writing about hybrid schools “just because I thought it was kind of a niche or boutique kind of answer to school choice.”” 

He found that most hybrids were private and church-based, though a few charter and district schools were experimenting with the model. The earliest hybrid schools coincided roughly with the rise of charter laws in the early 1990s.

By 2020, he’d learned enough to compile his research into a , which he handed to his publisher that March.

Also in March 2020: The pandemic closed virtually every school in America. Over the course of just a few days, Wearne said, “People sort of got very interested in different models of schooling.”

‘Non-classroom-based’ schools

Among those Wearne has worked with is Jennifer Cauzza, a lifelong California educator who began dabbling in hybrid schooling as far back as the 1990s, nearly as soon as legislators there passed the state’s first charter school law.

She remembers teaching in a rural high school that had a partnership with — one of its professors remotely taught a study skills class four days a week using what must have seemed a high-tech solution at the time: VCR tapes.

Students would watch lessons all week, and on Fridays he’d link up with the class via a videochat service called .

Her original hybrid school met in a barn northeast of San Diego, with 400 students, most of them homeschoolers. They soon began leasing their own space, and her school has since expanded into a network of . 

For Cauzza’s families, March 2020 felt like business as usual. 

“We were able, during the pandemic, to spin on a dime. We were able to transition to online opportunities overnight.”

As of this fall, a little over half of their students are traditional homeschoolers, and all of them hew to what Cauzza calls a “collegiate format,” expecting students to take a large portion of responsibility for their learning and be “independent, self-directed” learners. 

“Our goal is not to serve everybody,” Cauzza said bluntly. “Our goal is to find the students that learn best in this manner and to be able to serve them well.”

Wendy Schroeter and her husband sent both of their children to one of Cauzza’s schools. “They specifically work with them to make them self-directed learners,” she said. Students “become very self-reliant and able to not rely on mom, dad, or the teacher to nag them, because they just want to get it done.” 

At home amid economists

Wearne came to Kennesaw in 2020 to study the emerging landscape, and the now lives within the business school’s . Its scholars also study, more broadly, school choice, educational savings accounts, and parent engagement, among other topics.

His found that the growth of hybrid programs seems concentrated in suburbs. He found that among those who responded to the survey, the typical hybrid school enrolls about 227 students, mostly focused on K-5 instruction. And the vast majority — 83 percent — say they’re “religiously affiliated.”

Most rely heavily on part-time staff, with half employing 19 or fewer teachers. Nearly eight in 10 employed no full-time teachers at all.

While he’s just over two years into his tenure at Kennesaw, Wearne has already found that many hybrid schools fulfill the original aspirations of early charter schools, before they became, in his words, “extraordinarily regulated.”

And compared to existing private schools, he said, hybrids “don’t have to go through as much of a fundraising lift” to get up and running. 

Low tuition costs attract more middle-class families, he said. “They’re not populated with one-percenters. They’re populated with large families or with people who are more middle-class than the normal private-school clientele,”, he said. Many of these families chose hybrid schools in part because they simply can’t afford a local five-day-per-week private school.

They’re also beginning to build track records. “People are seeing their neighbors’ children are turning out O.K. when they leave the hybrids,” he said. “And so they’re willing to kind of give them a shot.”

But like most things in education, the center’s connections could limit its reach among public school advocates who might otherwise support hybrid schooling. Kennesaw State’s  is closely aligned with the school choice movement, and the Education Economics Center’s research findings often appear on the right-leaning website. 

Over the past few years Wearne has often found a home for in several conservative outlets such as .

More to the point, public school advocates are wary of programs that could direct more taxpayer funding to private schools.

“Instead of boosting private schools with zero accountability for their learning outcomes,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, “we should direct all of our energy towards meeting children’s needs, dealing with teacher shortages and fulfilling the purpose, promise and potential of public education.”

‘I’m still focused on my kids’

Many of the programs would say they’re doing just that: Wearne’s center has already identified a preponderance of STEM and outdoor-education schools, as well as programs focused on traditional classical education, such as Reilly’s Aquinas Learning in Virginia.

Thirteen years after she founded it, Reilly’s oldest child is now 22 and a graduate student in architecture at Notre Dame. Her others, all homeschooled, are either in college or making their way through high school.

Meanwhile, she’s busy selling her own self-published version of the curriculum — it doesn’t make her much money, she confided, but that was never the point. 

“My goal is that once they graduate, I can focus more on the business side of things and perhaps make it a nonprofit,” she said. That could attract philanthropic donors to help spread it more widely to more families, even outside the U.S. 

Once her youngest, a high school sophomore, has graduated, perhaps she’ll begin enjoying a bit of Aquinas-related travel.

But for now, she said, “I’m still focused on my kids.”

The total number of home schools in North Carolina fell during the 2021-22 school year, according to released by the state Department of Administration. The decrease — about 10% from the prior school year — may not come as a surprise given pandemic-related changes.

In 2020, as the pandemic hit and many schools closed, a surge in interest in home schooling for families to register. That surge was reflected in the data: The number of home schools in North Carolina from 2019-20 to 2020-21.

But that doesn’t appear to have stuck around. The data, released in July, indicates that North Carolina had 11,710 fewer home schools during the 2021-22 school year than in 2020-21.

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Longer-term trends

Despite the fluctuations of the previous two school years, the number of home schools in North Carolina has increased steadily over time. In the past five years, the number of home schools increased by about 16% — or 14,151 total schools. In the past decade, the number has nearly doubled.

Some counties have seen substantial increases since 2017:

• Onslow County: 53%
• Camden County: 46%
• Johnston County: 41%
• Orange County: 39%
• Hertford County: 39%

Also in that time, the share of religious home schools has slowly decreased, while the share of independent home schools has increased. In the 2017-18 school year, religious home schools made up nearly 59% of all North Carolina home schools. In 2021-22, they made up 53%.

Data by county

North Carolina’s counties have substantial variation in their number of home schools and changes over time. Wake County currently has the most home schools with 9,002, while Tyrrell County has 32.

In the 2021-22 data, certain counties saw especially large declines from the 2020-21 school year — Pitt, Swain, and Halifax had declines greater than 20%. Madison, Graham, Randolph, and Jones had declines of about 19%.

Only four counties — Cumberland, Tyrrell, Hertford and Rutherford — saw the number of home schools increase from 2020-21.

The graphic below shows percent changes in North Carolina home schools by county since 2017.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Implementing Routine COVID-19 Testing in Schools Can Significantly Reduce (and in Some Cases Eliminate) Transmission:

• “Modeling showed routine and robust testing programs are highly effective at reducing within-school COVID-19 transmission, but most schools require considerable support from federal and state authorities, including detailed operational guidance, practical assistance and resources to navigate logistical, regulatory and procurement needs.”
• “Modeling also showed that pooled PCR (nose swab) testing is generally the most effective testing strategy for higher-risk schools relying on testing to reduce within-school transmission. Serial antigen testing is a close second.”
• “Community engagement and buy-in from key stakeholders are critical to the success of a testing program. Effective communication and simplified processes helped build and maintain trust in the program.”
• Related: , via three doctors in The Boston Globe.
• Case study: 200 Schools, Universal Weekly COVID Screening: How ‘Assurance Testing’ Has Kept Thousands of Texas Students in Classrooms

July 30, 2021 — The Big Three

CDC Revises Mask Guidance: Just two weeks after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it was safe for vaccinated individuals to be maskless in schools, they revised their guidance, .”

• CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said the revised masking guidance is based on “.”
• The “substantial transmission” as 50 to 100 cases per 100,000 people in a seven-day period and “high transmission” as more than 100 cases per 100,000. Based on that criteria, 46 percent of counties have “high transmission” and 17 percent have “substantial transmission.”
• “Today, the CDC also reaffirmed that we can safely reopen schools this fall — full time. Masking students is inconvenient, I know, but will allow them to learn and be with their classmates with the best available protection.”
• “Masking inside schools regardless of vaccine status is required as an important way to deal with the changing realities of virus transmission. It is a necessary precaution until children under 12 can receive a COVID vaccine and more Americans over 12 get vaccinated.”

More Research Quantifies COVID Learning Loss: 

• Students fell four to five months behind during the pandemic,

• “Students in majority Black schools ended the year with , while students from low-income schools finished seven months behind.”
• “Unless steps are taken to address unfinished learning, today’s students may earn $49,000 to $61,000 less over their lifetime owing to the impact of the pandemic on their schooling.”

• Students made gains in 2020-21, but at a lower rate, . ()

• “Third-graders who attended a low-income school tested 17 percentile points lower in math this spring compared with similar students in 2019.”
• “Latino third-graders performed 17 percentile points lower in spring 2021 compared with the typical achievement of Latino third-graders in the spring of 2019. The decline was 15 percentile points for Black students.”
• “In one surprising finding, NWEA researchers found that students made some gains in the fall, but that the pace of learning stalled more significantly from winter to spring, even after many schools had returned in person.”

Homeschooling Surges, with Black Families Leading the Way:

• “Black households saw the largest jump; their homeschooling rate rose from 3.3 percent in the spring of 2020 to 16.1 percent in the fall.”
• “There’s no turning back for us now,” one parent said. “The pandemic has been a blessing — an opportunity to take ownership of our children’s education.”
• “For some families, the switch to homeschooling was influenced by their children’s special needs. That’s the case for Jennifer Osgood of Fairfax, Vermont, whose 7-year-old daughter Lily has Down syndrome. Having observed Lily’s progress with reading and arithmetic while at home during the pandemic, Osgood is convinced homeschooling is the best option for her going forward.”

Federal Updates

Infrastructure Deal: A bipartisan group of 10 negotiators reached agreement on a $1.2 trillion “hard infrastructure” package.

• The education provisions include support for electric vehicles and low-emission school buses. Plus $65 billion for broadband, which includes the
• The Senate voted 67-22 Wednesday evening to move forward with the proposal.
• Read more: , , .

U.S. Education Department:

$3 Billion in Investing in America’s Communities Grants: The Department of Commerce announced several competitive grants:

• Providing investment to 20 to 30 regions across the country to revitalize their economies.
• Will invest in building and strengthening regional workforce training systems and sector-based partnerships, with a focus on programs targeted at women, people of color and historically underserved communities.
• U.S. Economic Development Administration will work with tribal governments and indigenous communities to develop and execute the economic development projects they need to recover from the pandemic.
• Competitive grants to further invest in infrastructure, workforce or other projects to support recovery and resilience in the communities hardest hit by disruptions in the travel, tourism and outdoor recreation sectors.
• : Investing in projects that will promote equity and develop local economies that will be resilient to future economic shocks and climate change.

City & State News

California:

• He after one day.
• .

Colorado: Department of Public Health and Environment released for schools.

• Students, teachers and staff who are vaccinated will not have to wear masks at school and won’t have to quarantine if exposed to someone who is tested positive.
• Masks are recommended but not required.
• The department also shared an .

Illinois:

Michigan: Detroit public schools, Detroit Federation of Teachers reach a reopening agreement that includes

Texas:

• Margaret Spellings: .
• outlined its American Rescue Plan spending priorities, which include $135.91 million for a yearly $2,500 recruitment/retention stipend for teachers; $127.84 million on curriculum resources and professional development; $113.33 million for student interventions to address learning loss; $59.93 million for social-emotional learning and counselors; and $80 million for technology.

COVID-19 Research

Pfizer:

• The Biden administration purchased an additional 200 million doses “to prepare for future vaccination needs, .”
• Australia’s health regulator, the , approved the vaccine for children ages 12 to 15.
• showing that a third dose of its vaccine can “strongly” boost protection against the Delta variant — beyond the protection afforded by the standard two doses.
• . “If the vaccine’s efficacy continues to decline at the rate observed in the paper, it would fall below the 50 percent threshold — a benchmark for vaccine utility — within 18 months of vaccination.”

Moderna: approved the vaccine to be used in children ages 12 to 17.

• By the way: The Moderna vaccine is now called in the European Union.

FDA asks Pfizer, Moderna to Expand Children’s Trials: The move is “intended to assess whether a that has been seen in young adults shortly after vaccination is more common in younger age groups.”

• “A federal official who spoke on the condition of anonymity predicted that authorization of a coronavirus vaccine for children 5 through 11 might come by late October or early November.”
• “Moderna would likely seek authorization for the vaccine in “.”

A New Way to Visualize the Surge in COVID-19: Via

• “As an analogy, a car’s velocity tells you how fast the car is going. Its acceleration tells you how quickly that car is speeding up.”
• STAT compiled data from several sources to calculate the rate of weekly case acceleration which helps provide a new indicator of how intense a wave might be and how long it might last.
• By looking at the state’s case acceleration rate, we can see that cases in Louisiana are currently increasing faster than they did at the start of last winter’s wave.

Parents Split on Vaccine for Children Under 11:

• “49 percent of parents say it’s likely they will get their children vaccinated. 51 percent say it’s unlikely, even if approved by the FDA.”
• “Families with lower incomes are less likely to get the vaccine (38 percent likely to get the vaccine) than higher incomes (60 percent).”
• “Many parents report they have not discussed COVID vaccination with their child’s provider (50 percent older, 70 percent younger children).”

GOP Governors Call for Full Vaccine Approval: “As U.S. regulators weigh giving the final stamp of approval for certain COVID-19 vaccines, governors in states hard hit by the pandemic hope the move will help persuade the many holdouts in their states to finally get the shot,” .

Vaccinations Prevented Up to 279,000 COVID-19 Deaths:

mRNA Vaccinations vs. COVID-19 Risk in Teens – Vaccinations are Safer: .

Viewpoints

School Disrupted: Parents say pandemic learning models will remain into the new school year, according to a new (with support from the Walton Family Foundation).

• The adoption of supplemental learning pods is real – the percentage of parents enrolling their child is expected to expand next year.
• Parents report being highly satisfied with their decision to enroll their child in a supplemental learning pod, irrespective of their child’s core school.
• Parent satisfaction with alternative school models increased since the start of the pandemic and was higher than the satisfaction of parents whose child continued their pre-pandemic school arrangements
• Nearly all the parents who enrolled their child in a learning pod or microschool as a core school said they will continue with this model into the 2021-22 academic year

Feeling Uncertain and Unsettled: .

The United States Prosperity Index 2021: yesterday, the report provides a comprehensive picture of prosperity for the 50 states as well as the 1,196 counties in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma and Texas.

The Pandemic Drove Women Out of the Workforce. Will They Come Back?: .

Guides for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund Spending, Scheduling and Staffing: with advice on what to do now and what to build toward.

5 Ways Principals Can Make Federal Relief Money Matter More for Their Students:

…And on an Inspiring Note 

Find People Who Cheer You On:

ELECTRIC.

Relive the moment Lydia Jacoby’s friends and family cheered her on to GOLD from Seward, Alaska.

— #TokyoOlympics (@NBCOlympics)

ICYMI @The74

Weekend Reads: In case you missed them, our top five stories of the week:

• Summer Fun: Summer School, Reimagined — Tulsa Returns 11K Students to Campuses in July by Putting Fun Before Academics
• School Finance: Amid Historic Federal Windfall, School Leaders Find that Soaring Inflation is Curbing Their Ability to Purchase, Hire and Build
• Student Health: Ask the Doctor — With Delta Variant Rampant, How Can Parents Protect Young Kids from COVID this Summer and Fall?
• Learning Loss: Early Reading Skills See a Rebound From In-Person Learning, But Racial Gaps Have Grown Wider, Tests Show
• STEM: A Summer Rocket Program Launches Boston Girls Into the Next School Year

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .