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.”

A prolific researcher at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, Kahlenberg didn’t just welcome the end of affirmative action as we knew it — he served as an expert witness for the suit’s plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, in their successful efforts to strike down diversity plans at elite colleges as discriminatory and unconstitutional.

The 6–2 opinion represented the fulfillment of a generation of work for Kahlenberg, the author of 18 books ranging from personal memoirs to biographies to education policy tomes. For the last few decades, he has waged a long and sometimes unpopular campaign to broaden the focus of educational integration to make room for class, which he says represents the crucial divide in American life. Assembling racially heterogeneous students of identically middle- and upper-class backgrounds to learn together, while cordoning off the children of the working class and the poor, is the surest way to reinforce the advantages of the wealthy, he has argued. 

Just months after his argument carried the day at the Supreme Court, Kahlenberg is exploring a different facet of inequality in his new book, . 

Released in July, Excluded details how “exclusionary zoning practices,” such as bans on apartments or mandates for single-family homes, are used to restrict the supply of housing and further segregate neighborhoods as more hopeful buyers are priced out. What’s more, since most families choose where to live based at least partly on the quality of local schools, such tactics also push most of the top-performing public schools in the country out of reach of poor and working-class people.

It seems unlikely that convenings of zoning authorities will become as heated as school board meetings have in recent years. But to Kahlenberg, the NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) instinct is of a piece with Harvard’s now-banned admissions policies: a means of capturing opportunity by those with the resources and wherewithal to grab them. 

In a conversation with ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken, Kahlenberg spoke about the failure of ‘70s-era busing, his abiding admiration for Sen. Robert Kennedy, and what he calls liberalism’s “elitism problem.”

“Harvard gave large preferences based on race and created a majority-minority class, which I think is a wonderful thing,” he said. “But it also had many, many more wealthy students than low-income students. We’re beginning to see the ways in which racial preferences have propped up a much larger system that is biased against working-class and low-income people.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: How do the main themes of this book — zoning and access to housing — relate to schools?

Richard Kahlenberg: I come at housing from the perspective of education, and the architecture of educational inequality rests on two pillars. One is — bans on apartments, minimum lot sizes and the like — which keeps people apart by class and race. The other is mandatory neighborhood assignment for most students. Essentially, zoning rules determine who gets to live where, and that determines where children are allowed to go to school. 

There are exceptions to that in the form of public school choice programs that try to disentangle residence and school assignment. I’ve long been of those programs, but you bump your head against the reality that attend their neighborhood public schools.

Maybe I’m a slow learner, but I should have gotten into housing policy years ago. Housing policy is school policy. 

Reading the book, it made me think that education journalists should spend almost as much time following the agenda of local housing authorities as we do focusing on school boards.

You see an example of that in Montgomery County, Maryland, where there was a kind of natural experiment of what matters in improving the opportunities for low-income students. Around 2010, Heather Schwartz at the RAND Corporation that were pursued in this liberal, diverse county right outside of Washington, D.C.. One was to spend $2,000 extra for each pupil in high-poverty schools, for good things like extended learning time and reduced class size in early grades. 

At the same time, a local inclusionary zoning law mandates that when builders develop a certain number of units, they have to set aside a portion for low-income and working-class families. In essence, there was a random assignment of low-income students to different public housing units, which are spread throughout the county. Some of those students lived in the higher-poverty areas and received the extra $2,000 at school; the other group lived in more affluent parts of Montgomery County and didn’t receive the extra funding, but did attend schools with lower levels of poverty.

Over time, Schwartz found that the housing intervention, which resulted in economic integration, had a far greater effect on academic achievement than the school spending intervention. In seven years, the math gap was cut in half between low-income students and middle-class students, the reading gap was cut by one-third. It shows that housing policy matters enormously to student outcomes. 

Is it striking to you that land use is mostly a submerged issue in the K–12 agenda? After all, neighborhood selection is the way most people exercise school choice. 

Yes, people of means very often choose neighborhoods based on the strength of their schools. And everyone should look for what’s best for their kids. The problem comes when government actively excludes those of lesser means by rigging zoning laws to prevent lower-income people from living in certain neighborhoods.

So I don’t have any qualms with parents choosing housing in this way. I have a big problem with laws that effectively keep working-class families from exercising that same choice.

Do you agree that housing laws have gained this importance in part due to the Supreme Court’s ruling in , which made it extremely hard to mandate busing between cities and their surrounding suburbs? You’ve explored this fairly deeply in your writings about the socioeconomic integration of K–12 schools.

Busing became deeply problematic in the North, and it mostly worked in the South. The difference was that in the South, you often see countywide school systems, so there was no place to flee. There is that desegregation in the South had a much more positive effect on the achievement of African American students than it did in the North. 

And that brings us right back to the power of socioeconomic status. The research always suggested that the reason African American students did better in racially integrated schools was that, on average, whites had higher socioeconomic status. 

So in the South, there was cross-class and racial integration precisely because the districts encompassed cities and suburbs. In the North, that wasn’t often the case, and after Milliken, the power of racial integration to produce class integration diminished considerably. To be clear, I think there are social benefits to racial integration, even if it doesn’t increase academic achievement. It’s a good thing for children, but if you’re trying to raise academic achievement, it’s the socioeconomic mix that matters more than the racial mix.

The other piece of this is compulsion. Today, sophisticated integration plans — which, for legal and educational reasons, are built more on class than race — tend to rely on incentives and choice rather than compelling people. It’s because families with means are able to rebel, either buying out of the system or moving further out.

Intriguingly, the racial demography of urban areas has changed quite a bit in recent years, with both suburbs and inner cities than they were in the ’70s and ’80s. Is the same true of socioeconomic status?

Black-white segregation has declined by . While we haven’t made enough progress on racial segregation, and it’s still really prominent in many cities, we’re headed in the right direction. But Sean Reardon’s research at Stanford shows that, by contrast, income segregation has over the same time period. 

There have been two periods in this country when exclusionary zoning has accelerated. The first arrived in 1917, when the Supreme Court struck down racial zoning in . Black people were explicitly prohibited from living in white neighborhoods under these plans in Baltimore, Louisville, and elsewhere, and the Court said that was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. But very quickly, towns figured out they could achieve much the same result through economic zoning. You know, “You’re welcome to live in this neighborhood so long as you can afford a detached, single-family home on half an acre of land.” 

The second came in the 1970s, and its timing was suspicious in that Congress had just passed the Fair Housing Act. Communities doubled down on exclusionary zoning during that time as well, though it was less effective because by that time, there was a growing African American middle class. In some cases, they were able to buy homes in neighborhoods that were more affluent. [U.S. Senator] Cory Booker, whom I interview in the book would be one case; his parents were executives, and because of the Fair Housing Act, they were able to move to a Newark suburb called Harrington Park. He was able to attend strong schools and go off to Stanford, but he also had lots of friends and cousins who weren’t so economically fortunate. They remained behind.

The main point is that the two big expansions of this practice of exclusionary zoning came in response to advances for civil rights.

We’ve seen some modest wins recently for the YIMBY [“Yes in My Backyard”] in , but so many homeowners are really resistant to the idea of densifying their communities. Isn’t it likely that flooding resources to poor schools, while apparently less effective than socioeconomic integration, would be the easier way to effect change?

I do support putting more money into high-poverty schools, and I don’t think you have to choose between improving them and integrating them. You can do both.

My concern is that maybe 95 percent of education reform is about trying to make separate-but-equal more workable. I don’t want to abandon efforts to invest more resources in high-poverty schools, but we need this complementary strategy as well. For one thing, if your goal is raising achievement and the prospects of disadvantaged kids, a lot of evidence shows that it’s more effective to integrate than to provide extra resources.

Secondly, the two are connected in a reciprocal relationship. In theory, yes, you could try to invest tremendous amounts of money in under-resourced schools. But you’re asking the political system to support an effort whereby families with the least political power command the greatest resources. We do see that in states like New Jersey, where a state court for schools with high concentrations of poverty, and in a few other liberal communities like Montgomery County. But it’s not the rule. 

In other words, integration is politically difficult, but so is flooding poor schools with massive resources. The other thing is that when we take housing policy off the table, we miss the importance of neighborhoods in predicting life chances. Because it’s not just academics and schooling, it’s about who you know in your neighborhood and what social connections they have that could benefit you down the line. That social aspect is another reason not to pursue a neo-Plessy [v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court decision authorizing separate, but equal public accommodations] approach of accepting segregation and trying to do the best you can with it.

You’ve already mentioned your support for public school choice policies like . Do you think the rapid spread of Education Savings Accounts in red states is likely to temper or accelerate segregation along lines of race and class?

That stuff is a big step backward. My former Century Foundation colleague, Halley Potter, of whether private school vouchers increased or decreased segregation. Her answer was that they increase it, and certainly that was the of many of the early proponents of voucher programs in the South — to create more segregation, not less.

Here’s a good explanation for the necessity of public school systems. I wrote , the longtime leader of the American Federation of Teachers. One of the stories I learned writing it took place at a private meeting of education mucky-mucks. At a certain point, the president of Notre Dame stood up and asked, “What is the rationale for public education in the first place, as opposed to people just taking their money to a system of private schools?” There was a long silence, after which Shanker said, “The reason we have public schools is that they teach kids what it means to be American.” And it’s true that the charge of public schools is to instill the liberal democratic values that make our nation different from a lot of others, even if they don’t do it perfectly.

Private schools have different purposes, which usually include deepening a particular religious faith. That’s fine, but their purpose is generally not to create better citizens. I know there are studies that claim private schools do a good job imparting the values of citizenship. I’ve got some problems with some of those studies, but the point is that public education’s rationale is to make possible the continuation of our experiment in self-governance. I don’t want to give up on that lightly.

Robert Kennedy was a hero of yours, and you invoke his philosophy in the book as a corrective to what you call liberalism’s “serious problem with elitism.” What do you think he would have made of the end of affirmative action in college admissions?

Bobby Kennedy is a touchstone for me. In the 1968 presidential campaign, he made the observation that we have deep racial inequalities in this country, but that underneath them are even bigger class divisions that often go ignored. We use race as a proxy for class in a lot of political conversations.

That tendency serves the interest of my fellow highly educated liberals. If you take the example of affirmative action, Harvard gave large preferences based on race and created a majority-minority class, which I think is a wonderful thing. But it also had many, many more wealthy students than low-income students. We’re beginning to see the ways in which racial preferences have propped up a much larger system that is biased against working-class and low-income people.

At Harvard, 71 percent of the African American, Hispanic, and Native American students came from the richest one-fifth of the African American, Hispanic, and Native American population nationally. White and Asian students were even wealthier. There was even a way in which racial preferences propped up legacy preferences, in that people who supported lowering admissions standards for enormously advantaged applicants could point to racial diversity and say, “Look, the system’s fair. There are lots of different factors we take into account.” Now we see that legacy preferences, and I think a lot of other elite universities are going to give up that unfair, ancestry-based privilege. 

On elitism, Fareed Zakaria that the cardinal sin of the Right is racism, and the cardinal sin of the Left is elitism. One might expect that politically conservative areas would have more exclusionary practices — because, for instance, voters in those areas are more likely to support an exclusionary wall between the United States and Mexico. But in fact, there is substantial research to suggest that the worst forms of exclusionary zoning are in along the coasts. Even within states, there are more acute forms of exclusionary zoning in politically liberal communities.

Why would liberals, who generally consider themselves openhearted and inclusive of people of color and LGBT individuals, be exclusionary in this way? The more benign explanation is that liberals support environmental protection, regulation, and due process, all of which tend to make it harder to build housing and other major projects. At the very least, those have been weaponized by liberals to exclude. 

And there’s a less charitable explanation. As Democrats , there were both good and bad things that came with that. Some suggests that people with high levels of education have more favorable attitudes towards traditional targets of prejudice. That’s a good thing, but at the same time, highly educated people exhibit many more stereotypes and negative attitudes toward those with less education — the folks that Hillary Clinton famously described as “deplorable.” I think liberals like me need to take a close look in the mirror on some of these issues of class bias.

Do you think self-interest is playing a role as well? In my interview with Tony Carnevale, he basically said that most schools don’t believe they can afford to be more class-diverse. Obviously, many people also fear that new housing will lower their own home values.

Absolutely. The reason why universities have sought racial diversity without class diversity is that it’s cheaper. You can devote more resources to faculty salaries, expanded administration, new buildings, and the rest of the things universities want to do.

But there’s good news from states [such as California, Florida, and Michigan] that have previously banned affirmative action. The evidence suggests that universities won’t just give up on racial diversity; those with resources will reach into their pockets and provide more money to expand socioeconomic diversity as a means of indirectly creating racial diversity.

During the recent Students for Fair Admissions litigation, the University of North Carolina said, “We can’t afford to expand financial aid. It’s not a viable alternative to using race in admissions.” Lo and behold, after the Supreme Court ruled, that it will significantly expand their financial aid. And kudos to them for finding the money necessary to foster racial diversity!

Over time, universities will develop a number of new liberal programs to ensure that racial diversity is achieved — by giving a break to economically disadvantaged students, by expanding financial aid, by eliminating unfair preferences for the children of alumni. Then we can end up with both racial and socioeconomic diversity.

You’ve naturally got to be pleased to have prevailed in court in your capacity as a witness. But how is this ruling going to lead to more egalitarian colleges and universities? What needs to happen next, whether in colleges, statehouses, or Congress?

There’s a paradox in public opinion polling. On one hand, Americans are deeply opposed to counting race as a factor of who gets into college. Pew found to using race. At the same time, Americans want their universities to be racially and economically diverse, and they strongly support other efforts — such as giving an edge to students from low-income backgrounds — in order to create diversity. 

When racial preferences were banned in states like Texas and Florida back in the ’90s, Republican governors worked with state legislatures to come up with of . That is to say, states and universities did not simply give up on racial diversity when they couldn’t use race in admissions, because the political system does not want to see segregation in elite higher education. 

The other dynamic is that the Republican Party is increasingly the party of the white working class. White working-class people have been angry about affirmative action for a long time. But suddenly, universities are going to start saying, “We’re going to provide a meaningful break to working-class students of all races.” I find it hard to believe that Republicans will oppose those efforts at the very moment that their political base becomes eligible for class-based affirmative action.

It seems like your emphasis on integration raises questions about the nature of what we call “school quality.” If the socioeconomic background of your classmates is a major factor in determining what you can learn — as way back in the ’60s — then should we order our priorities to pursue residential and school integration over more conventional school improvement efforts?

I would broadly agree. If the dual purposes of public education are to create social mobility on the one hand, and social cohesion on the other, then we want to use housing policy and public school choice to bring kids of different backgrounds together. Economically segregated schools oftentimes defeat well-intentioned education reform efforts.

If you care about curriculum or teaching, as I do, having a system segregated by class makes it more difficult to provide equality. You want all students to be exposed to a good curriculum, for example, but we know that there are many fewer advanced classes offered in high-poverty schools. We also know that some teachers consider it a promotion to move from a high-poverty school to a middle-class school. 

You can chip away at that. I support paying bonuses to highly qualified teachers who agree to teach in high-poverty schools, and I support the expansion of AP classes in high-poverty schools. But at the end of the day, those efforts ignore the essential reality that Coleman detected in his study, which grew out of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: Separate schools for rich and poor are rarely equal. Rather than putting our heads in the sand and ignoring that central finding, which has been repeated and repeated again since Coleman, I think we need to face it head-on.

She envisioned teaching elementary students in the primary space and middle schoolers in the casita. The sheds would be for students’ personal interests, like metal working and car repair. But in July, after she put down a $5,000 deposit and just weeks before she was ready to open, Howard ran up against the county’s zoning bureaucracy. Despite plans to serve about a dozen students, officials told her the law required private schools to have at least five acres of land.

“We lost our money, and the families lost their anticipated school,” Howard said. “A lot of families are looking for an alternative to what they are seeing in public schools right now.”

Microschools, as such small learning environments are known, aren’t new. The model took off during the pandemic, and now serves between students. But as interest has surged, so have regulatory snags. Parents and educators with dreams of running their own schools are clashing with local officials armed with sometimes arcane rules that were never designed for education. Lawyers and veterans of unconventional education programs are now jumping in to help newcomers navigate everything from fire codes to food safety.

“It’s the problem that comes with trying to fit a square peg in a round hole,” said Paul Avelar, an attorney with the conservative Institute for Justice. The public interest law firm, which has won major school choice victories before the U.S. Supreme Court, represents Howard. Avelar wants Pinal County to in light of a that says counties can’t require a private school to have more than one acre of land. He hopes to have an answer by the end of this month. 

“This is going to be one of those growing pains,” he said.

There are now an estimated 125,000 microschools in the United States, said Don Soifer, executive director of the Las Vegas-based National Microschooling Center. Those running them have varied backgrounds and reasons for taking the plunge. While some started out as homeschoolers, other operators left the public system in search of greater flexibility or to offer students a more personalized education. Over 60% of microschool founders are white, and almost three-fourths of leaders are or were certified educators, according to the center’s recent .

Lawmakers are beginning to pay attention. A Utah proposal this year would have written microschools into the law, permitting them to operate virtually anywhere, much like charters. Despite a close vote, the bill failed after Democrats over traffic in residential areas and said it would further draw families away from public schools.

While they wait for local officials to respond, many advocates warn that microschools ignore the regulatory system at their peril.  

“We don’t want a graveyard of microschools that we’re looking back on,” said Jamie Buckland, founder of West Virginia Families United for Education, a homeschooling and school choice advocacy group. “If you’re going to charge someone money to educate their child, you do have a responsibility to dot your i’s and cross your t’s.” 

In West Virginia, that money includes public education funds. Students attending microschools are eligible for the state’s , an education savings account, which this year is set at $4,488 per student. ESAs allow families to pay private school tuition or cover a wide variety of homeschooling expenses. 

Buckland has been advising homeschooling families for 16 years. Some of those families collaborate to teach multiple children — an arrangement that might now be called a microschool. She provides workshops across the state on details from employment taxes to liability insurance.

Microschool operators often use spare church spaces, and may incorrectly assume their insurance is covered by the church. Buckland also recommends that schools that store data online invest in cyber insurance to protect from data breaches. 

She urges vigilance because opponents of vouchers are on the lookout for “fly-by-night schools and start-ups who don’t understand what they are liable for.” 

Beth Lewis, director of Save Our Schools Arizona, a pro-public schools group, is among those who think microschools lack sufficient safeguards. Many operate from private homes that lack pool fences, gun safes and locked medicine cabinets to protect children, she said. 

“We have asked questions about who is ultimately responsible if something happens to a child at a microschool,” she said. But when she contacts state authorities about these questions, she usually gets the runaround. “It’s only a matter of time before something happens and a child is hurt.” 

‘Just want to teach’

Whether public or private, microschools can be subject to land use restrictions and health and safety mandates. But these often vary by county and city, leaving school leaders at the mercy of local bureaucrats who frequently lack experience with schools. 

“Overzealous regulators are looking to do their jobs, and doing it inconsistently,” Soifer said.

Almost weekly, his team is on the phone negotiating with officials who are unfamiliar with microschools. If they’re trying to shut down a school, he often seeks a temporary exception that lasts at least until the end of the school year to avoid disruption. 

The risk of shutdowns can be enough to make leaders resort to using terms such as “learning community” — anything other than “school” — to describe their work.

Lizette Valles, a former private school English teacher and librarian, runs a microschool out of a warehouse in an industrial area south of downtown Los Angeles. Sharing space with a race car garage and a plant nursery, the school serves just a few in-person students, but reaches kids learning from home or  in an RV.

County fire officials determined a glass enclosure around the classroom space violates industrial zoning codes. But the owners, whose children attend the program, satisfied those concerns — for now. 

“In the long run, this is not sustainable,” said Valles, who is already looking for another space. “I just want to teach kids.” 

Over a third of microschools occupy a commercial business space, according to the microschool center’s report. That means prospective school leaders might have to conduct a traffic analysis or notify the surrounding community of a school’s opening, even if it will only serve a small group of students. 

Pizza, goats

Soifer has heard numerous examples of regulations designed to govern traditional schools or businesses clashing with educational programs that don’t fit the mold.

A health department in southern Nevada, for example, wouldn’t allow a microschool in Clark County to order pizza for students on Fridays because it lacked a commercial kitchen. 

Soifer advises microschool operators to avoid serving younger students altogether because child care licensing rules can be especially difficult to navigate. Last fall, Hawaii officials on the Big Island they said was an “unlicensed preschool” and didn’t meet credentialing requirements for staff.

This fall, Katie Saiz, who runs Green Gate Children’s School in Wichita, Kansas, bought a couple of goats for the preschoolers and elementary-age students to take care of. But the city first required her to get permission from members of a homeowners association in the surrounding neighborhood.

With years of experience running a microschool, she wants to help other educators avoid such pitfalls. She’s creating an online guide to the regulatory process for microschools, with a grant from the , which supports innovative education programs.

‘Just wanted to give up’

Regulatory delays can leave parents scrambling for a backup plan. When Tamra Hopkins had to put off opening Desert Peach Montessori in Reno, Nevada this spring, five families suddenly had to find another school. 

She thought the process would be easy. After identifying an old church building that previously housed a preschool, regulators told her she had to erect a 6-foot-high retaining wall — a legally required buffer between child care centers and residential areas. 

Then she had to hold a public forum to gather input from the community. Many residents opposed the move, concerned that a property zoned as a “public facility” would one day invite a hospital or some other high-traffic facility to move in. Prospective parents attended the gathering to voice their support for the program. 

“They must have really wanted this for their children,” Hopkins said. The program opened in August after the city granted the school a special permit to serve up to 54 students. 

“In the end, it was good news,” she said. “But there were so many times that we just wanted to give up.”