They signed a lease with the local historical society for the and checked with the city to ensure that a tiny alternative school could occupy the building, erected in 1905 by a son of the city’s founder. They opened in February 2021 and moved in with just four students.

A month later, city officials broke the bad news: The Bryan House was actually zoned as a “learning center,” an informal space for tutoring and exhibitions — not a school. It had a sprinkler system, fire alarms and a fire escape. But if they were to stay, the historical society would have to install massive metal fire doors, among other changes. 

When the historical society balked, the couple persuaded it to let them back out of their lease. The change forced them to go virtual for the rest of the school year as they searched for a new space.

“That nearly broke us,” Slaven said.

But new regulations, approved last year by state lawmakers, could save future microschools from similar headaches. The regulations say private schools can occupy existing spaces from museums to movie theaters without seeking local government approval. 

Making more locations accessible to microschools could help the movement grow nationally, just as education saving account laws in places like Florida and elsewhere have opened them up for consideration by families who otherwise couldn’t afford them.

The new Florida regulations, Slaven said, “are a really big deal for the ecosystem.” If they’d been in place two years earlier, he and his students could have stayed at Bryan House. 

Florida was already a leader in the burgeoning microschool movement — the group counts more than 250 programs in its current directory. But the new regulations, first reported by , could be groundbreaking, advocates say, tempting lawmakers elsewhere to do the same. passed the first law limiting state regulation of “learning pods” in 2021 and similar changes have since taken place in .

“The first generation, so many of these were in church basements or people’s homes,” said Michael McShane, director of national research at , a policy organization. If the sector is to grow, he said, “they need to be able to operate in more readily available spaces.”

McShane and a colleague that between 1.1 and 2.1 million school-aged children nationwide, or 2% to 4%, used microschools as their main provider.

But microschools often face maddening regulatory challenges. McShane recalled hearing from an educator converting a commercial space into a microschool who installed half-inch drywall. Regulators said he had to rip it out and install the three-quarter-inch variety. In another instance, a microschool seeking to set up shop at an old mini-golf course had to not just decommission a play windmill but raze it.

Nathan Hoffman, senior legislative director for the , a policy group founded by former Republican Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, said the changes build on Florida’s 2023 that “really blew the doors open on what’s possible” in different forms of schooling. He noted that upwards of 400,000 to 450,000 Florida students are now receiving taxpayer-supported scholarships to attend private schools, including microschools. “It’s created, I think, a whole new way that parents are interacting with K-12 education that we’re only just now getting to understand.”

But policymakers are also realizing that if microschools are to thrive, they can’t be regulated the same as larger schools, Hoffman said. “They’re only serving 30, 40, maybe 50 families. They’re not serving hundreds of families. The size of the buildings that are necessary, the land that’s necessary, is not going to be the same.”

In that respect, microschools are reminiscent of a similar movement that began more than 30 years earlier.

Don Soifer, CEO of the , said the new microschooling founders remind him of “those life-changing educators that we had in the beginning of the charter school movement — it’s fun to be around them.”

A longtime school choice advocate, Soifer opened his own microschool near Las Vegas during the Covid pandemic. In the process, he began consulting with other operators and soon realized they needed help navigating the technical, legal and pedagogical obstacles they faced. He now trains school leaders and offers them access to digital learning and student management tools from providers that typically deal only with school districts. 

Families taking on all the risk

Not everyone welcomes the new changes — or the explosive growth of the sector. 

The Florida League of Cities the legislation, saying it would prevent cities and counties from having a say in school rezoning.

Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University and author of the The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, noted that Florida, like other states, requires students to be de-enrolled in public school to be eligible for education savings accounts, which give families state funds for tuition or homeschooling expenses. These accounts have helped microschools flourish, since they offer families “one more place to spend that money.”

To that end, Cowen called microschools “the food trucks of the new education industry.” 

As with food trucks, he said, these new models may allow for schools to quickly open and offer students new options. But even if they’re appealing, he said, safety monitoring “is probably poorer.” The hours are sporadic, and even in the best case, he said, it “could pick up and leave tomorrow — or close altogether because the margins didn’t work for the business model.”

That risk-reward equation, he said, “is fine when you’re shopping for a taco. Not when you’re shopping for a school that’s intended to give your kid a strong start in life.” Families also take on virtually all of the financial risks associated with microschools, he said, especially those backed by .

Hoffman, the Florida legislative director, said the food truck analogy is “extremely outdated,” invoking fears similar to those of early homeschooling as serving isolated rural, off-the-grid families. “That’s just not the case anymore,” he said. “The fastest growing segment of the homeschool population are ” in urban areas.

Likewise, he said, microschools “are fine options for families that want to use them.”

Soifer said microschooling will likely never be competitive with options like charter schools and private-school vouchers, noting that ESAs have typically been designed to help make Catholic schools more affordable and that many states saying programs must hold accreditation to participate. He pointed out that many microschools closed in Washington, D.C., because parents couldn’t take advantage of the city’s longtime . It requires schools to file, among other things, two years of audited financial statements. 

“Broadly speaking, the frameworks need to modernize,” he said. The changes in Florida are “one important lever that lets us do that.”

Hoffman, the Florida policy advisor, added that state regulations prevent “fly-by-night” operators who can “come in and come in on Tuesday and say, ‘I want to serve students,’ and by Wednesday you’re serving students.”

On occasion, however, microschool parents have had bad experiences, as with a West Virginia operation that one parent called “a glorified babysitter.”

‘Mystical alignment of the universe’

Not far from Fort Lauderdale, in Coral Springs, Fla., Frank Farro and his wife Natalie in 2020 were looking for a place to start their own microschool. Like the Slavens, they wanted to bring an Acton Academy network school to their neighborhood. And like the Slavens, they struggled to find a building. “Location has been the hardest thing for us,” Frank Farro said. “Not even close.” 

The couple found a suitable space in a commercial building, but ended up getting kicked out when another school reclaimed it after the pandemic. Looser regulations would open more spaces for consideration, he said.

Like many others, the Farros’ school has grown quickly, from just six students in 2020 to 32 this fall. They’re currently renting about 5,000 square feet from a church, but Farro anticipates they’ll reach capacity in about six months, with a planned enrollment of around 60 students.

“Then we’ll be looking for our forever campus,” he said. “And that’s when things will get even more interesting.”

In 2020, he recalled, they looked at a five-acre tree farm in nearby Coconut Creek. It had a few houses that could serve as classrooms and seemed perfect. But at a selling price of $1.5 million, it didn’t seem practical for just six students.

Farro noticed recently that the property is back on the market this summer — for a cool $4 million.

Finding the right space, with playgrounds and outdoor spaces, he said, is “near impossible,” but he hopes the new regulations open up other options. As it is, “you have to find some mystical alignment of the universe in order to land a place that is zoned for a school — or you have to be massive, with a massive amount of capital, to go find another place.”

But over the years, parents have struggled to find good opening questions. 

“You’d search [the Internet], you’d go on Pinterest,” she said. “A lot of the work had to be done manually, or you had to do a lot more digging around.”

Then came ChatGPT, Open AI’s widely used artificial intelligence bot. For Fender, it was a no-brainer to query it for help developing deep opening questions.

The chatbot and other AI tools like it have found an eager audience among homeschoolers and microschoolers, with parents and teachers readily embracing it as a brainstorming and management tool, even as public schools take a more cautious approach, often . 

A few observers say AI may even make homeschooling more practical, opening it up to busy parents who might have balked previously.

“Homeschoolers have always been unconstrained in their ability to combine technology — any kind of tech,” said Alex Sarlin, a longtime technology analyst and co-host of the podcast. 

The reasons are readily apparent, he said: Home internet service typically doesn’t block key websites the way most schools do. Families can more easily manage data privacy and get the digital tools they want without fuss. They’re basically able to ignore “all the dozen reasons why everything falls apart when you try to sell to schools,” Sarlin said. 

Persuading homeschoolers to try out new things is also a lot simpler: If a student and parents like a tool, “There’s nobody else you have to convince.”

Indeed, a by the curriculum vendor found that 44% of homeschool educators reported using ChatGPT, compared to 34% of classroom educators.

“Not everyone is using it, but some are very excited about it,” said Amir Nathoo, co-founder of Outschool, an online education platform.

The most interesting uses he has seen are by gifted and neurodiverse homeschoolers, who often use chatbots to explore complex topics like advanced math and science, philosophy and even ethics, which they wouldn’t ordinarily have access to at a young age. They ask it to provide simple explanations of advanced topics, such as relativity and quantum mechanics, then pursue them on their own. “They’re able to go on a relatively unstructured exploration, which is often the best way that kids learn.”

Alternatively, he said, kids whose ability to express themselves is limited can also benefit from what many consider the non-judgmental qualities of tools like ChatGPT. 

Peer-to-peer learning

Tobin Slaven, cofounder of , a self-paced, independent microschool in Fort Lauderdale, said he’s been experimenting with AI tools for the past year or so and is excited by what he’s seen. “This is what the future looks like to me,” he said

Like many educators, he sees the problems inherent in AI tools like ChatGPT, which on occasion “” with incorrect information and can sometimes be . These concerns have stopped many families from fully embracing AI.

But Slaven can’t support banning it outright. Instead, he’ll offer a student his own device with ChatGPT loaded onto a browser window. The entire time, he has access to their queries and results. That ensures he can review the sessions for inappropriate content.

Lately, Slaven and his students have been playing with an AI tool called that helps them create and develop projects. Designed by a small, two-person UK-based startup, it’s set up like a simple chatbot that asks students what they want to learn about. It elicits information, much like a Socratic guide, about their prior knowledge and how they’d like to explore the topic. Then it searches the Internet for appropriate resources and returns suggestions on what to do next. 

Pathfinder uses Open AI’s GPT-4 large language model and its own algorithm to rank resources based on how relevant it is to an individual learner, said co-founder Amaan Ahmad. That includes how they learn best, what they’re interested in and what they already know. 

After a number of students in a homeschool group or class have worked with it long enough, it can even begin recommending classmates or friends to consult with to learn how they’re approaching the topic. 

“My AI can talk to your AI and say, ‘Hey, Greg crushed that last week. Why don’t you go speak to him and develop your project together?’” he said. 

Slaven tried out Pathfinder with a group of students recently and found that even during a brief trial run, it allowed them to better conceptualize their projects. 

With the tool asking them questions about their preferred topic, they were able to go from general inquiries about their interests, such as horseback riding or space exploration, into more advanced ones that explore the topics more deeply. That goes a long way toward helping students become more independent and responsible for their own learning, a key goal of microschooling and homeschooling.

Slaven believes, more broadly, that AI co-pilots configured to students’ interests and preferences will enable personalized learning at scale. It’ll become the norm that everyone has a collaborative AI partner that will, in time, understand how each student performs best and under what conditions. “It’s eventually going to become their preferred resource,” he said.

Making homeschooling more accessible

Ahmad, the Pathfinder co-founder, said AI holds the possibility of helping endeavors like microschooling and homeschooling become more practical. Access to reliable, safe AI agents means that an individual student isn’t restricted to what a parent or teacher knows.

Giving that autonomy with a bit of guidance helps make learning much more impactful, he said. “It’s very difficult to do that in real time because with one adult and one kid, you can’t always be by their side. And if you have a microschool with 12 to 16 kids, that’s even more time-consuming.” 

For Fender, the North Carolina homeschooling mother, one of the most helpful aspects of AI is that it helps parents organize what can often be a chaotic, free-form learning environment. 

Fender subscribes to a type of homeschooling known as “,” which seeks to teach students to be more self-directed and independent than in most public schools. Her kids’ lessons are “very much interest-led” and her small co-op has grown in recent years. 

But she must also persuade state bureaucrats that she’s providing an adequate education. So she and a few other homeschool parents in Cary rely on a website that uses AI to detail what activities their kids have done and auto-completes all of the relevant North Carolina educational standards. “I thought that was a genius tool,” she said, and one that allows stressed, busy parents to build a comprehensive portfolio for annual state reviews and high school transcripts.

Fender also uses ChatGPT for brainstorming. In a recent case, which she shared on , Fender asked the AI for 50 real-life applications for the Pythagorean theorem. It generated a list that included designing ramps or stairs, planning optimal pathways in garden design and building efficient roller coasters. 

Last year, she recalled, one of her daughters was creating Christmas cards for a homeschool craft fair and “wanted to have fun puns in the cards.” Fender explained how to craft an AI prompt — and how to sift through the chaff. Her daughter eventually asked ChatGPT for 50 different Christmas-themed puns and ended up using about 10 to 15. 

Like most parents, Fender has read about the downsides of AI but believes schools are short-sighted to limit its use. 

“Why are you banning a tool that is definitely here to stay?” she said. “Maybe we don’t understand all the ins and outs, but at the end of the day, our goal is to prepare kids for the jobs of the future. And a lot of these jobs of the future, we don’t even know what they are.”