TAVERNIER, Fla. – Every year, millions of students across America learn the foundational concept of place value in math. But it’s a safe bet few of them learn it at the beach.

At the first microschool in the Florida Keys, that’s exactly what a handful of kindergartners and first graders were doing with their teacher last week. Standing in the shade of buttonwoods on the edge of the Atlantic, they used mahogany seed pods, mangrove propagules, and sea grape leaves to help their brains grasp the idea.

In Florida, this is public education.

The students all use state-supported school choice scholarships to attend Coastal Glades Microschool, a new elementary school founded by former public school teachers Samantha Simpson and Jennifer Lavoie. Both 13-year educators, Simpson and Lavoie wanted a school that reflected their preferred approach to teaching and learning, as well as the goals and values of the families they sought to serve.

The result: Coastal Glades is Montessori-based, immersed in the outdoors, and deeply tied to the local community.

It’s also totally theirs to run as they see fit.

“We’re free. We own it. We don’t have anyone telling us what to do,” Lavoie said. “That’s priceless.”

Florida is leading the country in education freedom, with more than 500,000 students now using choice scholarships. Coastal Glades is another distinctive example of what that freedom looks like.

Microschools are popping up by the hundreds. Former public school teachers are the vanguard in creating them. All the new learning options are stunning, not just in volume but in diversity. In Florida, at least 150 Montessori schools participate in the choice scholarship programs, and at last count, at least 40 “nature schools” serve Florida families, too.

This movement is self-propelled. It’s driven by parents, teachers, and communities who are realizing more every day that public education is in the middle of a sea change. Now, they get to decide what “a good education” looks like.

For the past six years, Simpson and Lavoie worked together at the same school. As choice options exploded around them, freedom kept tapping them on the shoulder.

“We said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just pick up these four walls and move? And it just be us?’” Lavoie said.

To get their bearings, Simpson called a friend, another former public school teacher who founded a microschool. This one happened to be 90 miles north in Broward County, the unofficial microschool capital of America. The friend gave her good advice. She also said starting her own school was “the best thing I’ve ever done.”

Learning at Coastal Glades is proudly “place based.” The colorful communities that populate the islands between the Everglades and the sea are an endless source of exploration and inspiration. Simpson and Lavoie want their students to know and love where they live, so they can grow up to be good citizens and thoughtful stewards.

“Being in the community, being in nature, that’s where you’re going to learn,” Simpson said.

The students learned about bees from a local guy who harvests mangrove honey. They visited a berry farm on the mainland. Even more exotic trips are on tap: To Everglades National Park. To the Keys’ sea turtle hospital. Even to a reef where the students will be able to snorkel near nurse sharks. “We want them to learn that some scary things are not really scary,” Simpson said.

Nearly every day, the students visit natural areas for play-based learning. After the math lesson beneath the buttonwoods, for example, they went hunting for hermit crabs and jellyfish.

“This is just as important as testing, as reading, as anything,” Simpson said. “We want to bring back childhood and the love of learning.”

That’s exactly why Alejandra Reyes enrolled her 5-year-old daughter, Daniella. Daniella’s curiosity is blossoming, Reyes said, because she’s in a small school with more individualized attention and more hands-on learning.

“I didn’t want her to be in class sitting down all day. She’s such a free-spirited little girl,” said Reyes, a stay-at-home mom whose husband is a marine mechanic. “She’s learning so much on her little adventures. It’s, ‘What’s this? What’s that? Let’s look it up.’ “

“We got so lucky that my daughter’s first experience with school is this microschool.”

Simpson and Lavoie like the state of Florida’s academic standards. They use them to guide instruction. But they’re not tethered to pacing guides, and they can switch gears or directions whenever it makes sense. They do that often with their one older student, a fifth grader who was bored in his prior school because he wasn’t being challenged.

At the beach the other day, the older student got to learn about mass, volume, density, and buoyancy while his younger classmates were doing the lesson on place value.

Simpson set out two buckets, one filled with freshwater, one filled with saltwater. The student built a mini boat out of aluminum foil to float on the surface of each, then carefully piled pennies into it to see which boat in which bucket could sustain the most weight. (The one in saltwater won.)

“He loves engineering and problem solving,” Simpson said. And the school has the flexibility to accommodate him with more advanced lessons.

As it becomes even more mainstream, school choice in Florida is experiencing some growing pains. Coastal Glades represents some of those challenges, too.

For classroom space, the school rents a 250-square-foot room in a church. The church meets fire codes for dozens of parishioners, but not for a handful of students. Coastal Glades isn’t the only unconventional learning option to learn about fire codes the hard way – see here, here, and here – but its predicament takes the cake.

In lieu of installing an expensive sprinkler system, which Simpson and Lavoie could not afford, the pair hired a local firefighter, at $37 an hour, to hang out while students were in the building. Since the additional requirements only kick in when there are more than five students, Coastal Glades was able to drop the firefighter as long as it capped enrollment.

Next year, the school will be in another building that shouldn’t have those issues, which means it will be able to serve more families.

Word’s already out on the “coconut telegraph” – that’s Keys-speak for grapevine – that the new school will be growing.

Reyes has no doubt that other parents will respond the same way she did.

“Times have changed. Schools are different,” she said. “What kid doesn’t want to be learning outdoors?”

Harvard professor Roland Fryer took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal recently to urge lawmakers and advocates to reinvigorate the drive to Milton Friedman’s vision of a dynamic demand-drive K-12 system:

Today’s school-choice ecosystem, which one might refer to as “market lite,” has helped thousands of families. But millions are waiting, and current choice programs operate within the same inadequate framework. Increasing choice on the margin through partial vouchers, magnet school or other measures has yielded disappointing results because of an imperfectly competitive market. Real competition doesn’t mean entering a lottery to attend a charter school or providing vouchers worth only a fraction of public-school funding.

Only a small number of states have adopted enough “market lite” proposals, in combination, to begin to realize the potential of an education system driven by families and supply by educators. Fryer puts his finger on the problem directly:

School choice as currently implemented is more patchwork than panacea. It’s like getting to pick between a government-run cafeteria and an alternative where the line is long and, more often than not, the dish you were hoping for has run out by the time you get to the front. Friedman envisioned a nation of all-you-can-eat buffets.

Every waitlist, in other words, is a policy failure. Fryer expresses enthusiasm for education savings account programs, and ESAs are indeed potentially less limited by supply constraints. The details however matter greatly: formula funded ESA programs have the transformative potential Fryer extols, whereas a program limited by annual appropriation seems likely to produce the dreaded waitlists.

The reality is that upper-income Americans have been investing in multi-vendor education at a growing rate for decades. Private spending on enrichment activities, including tutors, Kumon, summer camps, private lessons, Mathnasium, club sports and far more.

If you’ve ever felt exhausted by driving your kids around after school, or compared notes with other parents on this, you have been a part of this trend. Scholars have documented upper-income Americans spending approximately $9,000 per child per year on enrichment activities. How much credit do leafy suburban schools deserve for their monopoly on non-embarrassing scores on international achievement exams? No one can say for sure, but it may not be as much as commonly assumed.

The significance of the enrichment trend became apparent only after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Advantaged American families still paid exorbitant mortgage ransoms to access the best public schools, but they were not entirely relying upon those schools. Increasing numbers of families have correctly discerned that the opportunity cost of attending a district is simply too high.

Demand driven education is here — it’s just not evenly distributed. Policymakers in some states have democratized the opportunity to participate through ESAs, which have the transformative potential Fryer extols. Elite families will continue to engage in multi-vendor education with or without ESAs, but states with well-designed programs will share such opportunities across society. The future is indeed here; will we distribute it?

For the past several years, the story of American homeschooling has been a narrative sorely lacking reliable numbers.

Last week, The Washington Post filled the void with the first carefully assembled nationwide look at state and local administrative data.

It found that in the states where comparable data exist, homeschooling is up 51% during a six-year period that includes the pandemic and years since.

That's a seismic shift in American public education, but it's still poorly understood. Here's the full picture in a nutshell:

Homeschooling jumped, dramatically, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Some of that increase was sticky. Parents left schools and decided they liked it.

Some of it wasn't. Parents who tried their hand at homeschooling during the pandemic quickly returned to schools once they reopened.

There is regional variation. The trend appears stickier in parts of Florida than in, say, the DC suburb of Fairfax County, Virginia.

Homeschooling is down from its pandemic-era peak. But it's way up from the pre-pandemic status quo. And it's continuing a trend the predates the pandemic: the increase in families taking more control of their children's learning. This can take the form of homeschooling. It can also take the form of new education options that blur the lines between school and homeschool.

Up or down?

The Post caught the attention of skeptics, like writer and researcher Chad Aldeman, who himself opted to homeschool at the height of the pandemic, only to return once schools reopened. The homeschooling trends in his own county suggest hundreds of other parents made similar choices at the height of school closures.

Aldeman errs in implying that his county, a D.C. suburb where the median household income is nearly twice the national average, typifies the national trend. It doesn't.

The overall homeschooling increase in Fairfax is smaller, and the pandemic-era spike and subsequent decline more pronounced, than in the Post's multistate average.

There are several plausible reasons Fairfax stands out.

Compared to school systems in most of the country, Fairfax's pandemic-era school closures were notoriously long-lived and ineptly managed. This may have pushed more members of its highly educated population to take teaching into their own hands. Its high incomes also created a high opportunity cost for parents to continue homeschooling once schools reopened. The typical Fairfax parent who chose to remain out of work to support the homeschooling of their children would have foregone more money, and more potential wealth-building, than the typical American family.

Ultimately, Aldeman and the Post are both right. Homeschooling is way up from pre-pandemic levels. And it appears to be declining in many places right now. But it's still significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels, on average, and in some places, like Florida, the numbers are still going up.

Big or small?

Skeptics also pooh-pooh the magnitude of the rise of homeschooling. A 51% increase in homeschooling represents a shift from about 3% of American K-12 students to about 4.5%. Is that a big deal?

For one thing, 1.5% of American schoolchildren equals about 750,000 students. People can disagree whether a fundamental change in the learning arrangements for that many young people is a big deal.

But that number understates what's actually going on.

In Florida, two scholarship programs (the Unique Abilities scholarship and the Personalized Education Program, or PEP) allow families to pay for fully unbundled education. Combined, they're serving more than 100,000 students. Some students in the latter program may register as homeschoolers. Others don't. And students using PEP scholarships are explicitly legally distinct from homeschoolers.

In other words, many of them won't show up as homeschoolers in administrative data. However, all of them have the opportunity to engage in homeschool-like behavior. They might enroll in schools. They might not. Their parents have taken responsibility for assembling the educational program for their children. Other families have enrolled in hybrid schools, microschools or online schools. They won't show up as homeschoolers in administrative data, but they're blurring the lines between schooling and homeschooling.

Pandemic blip or permanent shift?

A useful analogy to help put the rise and decline of homeschooling in perspective is grocery delivery.

Instacart stated in 2012 with what may have seemed like a niche business. Then it suddenly exploded during the pandemic as people eschewed in-person shopping. It's since come back to earth, but the business is still far larger than before the pandemic and recently made a healthy stock market debut.

As a company, its future is uncertain, and turbulence lies ahead. But the zooming in on the trajectory of one grocery delivery company obscures a larger, more undeniable trend: online delivery is eating the retail business. Fresh meat and produce might be more resistant to this shift than, say, books or shoes. But Americans are getting more goods delivered to their doorsteps and buying less in physical stores. The trend is moving in one direction.

The same pattern applies to homeschooling or individual microschool and online learning providers. Individual options will have their ups and downs. But larger shifts are harder to ignore.

Public trust in institutions is declining. Anxious millennial parents want more transparency and communication from their schools. Remote work and flexible hours give them more opportunities to co-produce education with their children. They know each of their children is different, and they want learning experiences that accommodate these individual differences.

Homeschooling is one response to these larger shifts. Many of the distinct motivations for homeschooling captured in recent parent surveys by EdChoice boil down to trust. The No. 1 concern of homeschooling families, safety, can also be seen as a lack of trust that schools will provide children with a safe environment.

But there are obvious forces limiting the growth potential of homeschooling, strictly defined. An earlier Washington Post survey showed homeschool families typically rely on one parent, almost always the mother, remaining out of the workforce to take charge of educating their children.

At the same time, the profile of the typical homeschooler is changing. Homeschooling is becoming more diverse, as well as less conservative and traditionally religious. Many of these newer homeschoolers aren't ideologically opposed to public education. It stands to reason that if public education finds ways to earn these parents' trust and support their individual needs, it might yet find ways to keep them, much in the same way Wal-Mart and Amazon are devising ways to fend off the challenge from Instacart.

Homeschooling numbers, in other words, are best understood as leading indicators of larger shifts that public education ignores at its peril.

Go down, Moses
Way down in Egypt's land
Tell old Pharaoh
Let my people go

The Texas House of Representatives closed out the 3^rd special session by filing a deeply flawed ESA bill but never held a hearing on it. Stay tuned for further developments. Meanwhile, the Texas Tribune filed a fantastic piece featuring three Dallas Black mothers who support a choice program in order to allow themselves and others in their communities to run and sustain their own schools. This is an amazing piece of journalism that looks past spokespeople with dueling sets of talking points in Austin to talk to real people and explore their concerns. You should read it and share it widely.

An earlier post on this blog described the era of peonage, whereby private interests availed themselves of convict labor at below-market rates. Described by some as “neo-slavery” this was a morally repugnant institution but one which benefited powerful interests. It lasted far longer than it should have, but eventually earned a well-deserved spot in the dustbin of history.

The parallel here is not to public schooling per se but rather to ZIP code assignment. ZIP code assignment to schools effectively reduces children into indentured funding units. Powerful interests in today’s society financially benefit reducing children into indentured funding units. Like southern plantation owners and railroad magnates from a bygone era, they are not going to let peonage go away without a fight.

The Tribune piece can be understood in this light: a struggle for a more humane system, one that acknowledges and respects the need for pluralism and variety in schooling. My heart sang when the story of these heroic women included a description of the aid they had received from their fellows in Arizona:

"In Arizona, 40 Black moms gathered in 2016 with the same worries for their children, ready to dismantle what they call the school-to-prison pipeline. Their kids were bullied in school and did not feel supported by the teachers. The moms started by pushing school districts to form a re-entry-after-suspension plan and find alternatives to suspension as a disciplinary measure.

By 2021, they had opened their own microschool, also known as outsourced home schooling. The Arizona microschools depend on the state’s education savings account program for sustainability.

“The public school system that was in place was not doing what it was supposed to do. Our children were not reaping the benefits,” said Janelle Wood, the founder of Black Mothers Forum in Arizona. “And so we needed a tool to help us fuel our vehicle of the microschool in order for us to grow."

Choice provides families with the tools to chart their own path and determine their own future. It gives teachers like those featured in the Tribune the opportunity to create their own schools. Choice gives families the opportunity to find a school that is a good fit for their children. Texas legislators must decide between clinging to an antiquated past or embracing a brighter future.

 

Emily Hamilton’s two kids learn most things best by doing. 

For science, that means making smears on slides, dissecting everything from seeds to mollusks, and conducting chemistry experiments with beakers and flasks. For her daughter’s math, that means using manipulatives such as dominoes, blocks or games.  

The costs for those supplies add up quickly for Hamilton, who with her husband homeschools their two children, Wesley, 12, and Holly, 8. Both receive the Family Empowerment Scholarship for students with Unique Abilities, which allows families to personalize their students’ education by directing funds to where they’re needed most.  

The funds can be used for a combination of programs and approved expenses including therapists, specialists, curriculum, private school, and more.  

“Having unique learners often requires unique approaches to learning, and oftentimes that is through hands-on problem solving, experiential methods that require all of kinds of components to bring to life,” said Hamilton, who pays out of pocket to cover costs that are more than the scholarships are worth. For students with disabilities, scholarships average about $10,000 per student.  

This year, new legislation extended the flexibility enjoyed by parents like Hamilton to all the state’s K-12 scholarship programs. 

That increased flexibility can be a boon for families who choose to assemble a range of different learning options for their children. But it can also create risks of confusion or costly mistakes. For example, a family might make a purchase they think is reimbursable, only to learn later that it isn’t considered an eligible expense.  

To help families make the best possible use of their increased flexibility, and minimize risks and confusion, the new legislation required scholarship funding organizations to create new purchasing guides that would provide clarity to parents on what education-related expenses are eligible expenses for their respective scholarship.  

“We wanted to provide clarity,” said Doug Tuthill, president of Step Up For Students, Florida’s largest scholarship funding organization and host of this blog.  

“We want to provide as much flexibility as possible for families so they can customize the education of their child but at the same time, we want to protect the public good and make sure the tax dollars are being spent in the most efficient and effective way possible.” 

Parent needs, legislative intent and continuous feedback 

There are now two purchasing guides. One is for the Family Empowerment Scholarship for Educational Options and Florida Tax Credit Scholarships. These programs are open to all students and include those choosing the new Personalized Education Program. The other guide is for families using the   Family Empowerment Scholarship for students with Unique Abilities. The latter program, aimed at students with special needs, offers larger funding amounts and a wider range of eligible uses. 

Florida, which has offered ESAs to families of students with unique abilities since that program was created in 2014, has always had rules for how those families could use the money.  

“We had nine years of learning to help us develop the new purchasing guides,” said Tuthill. To develop the purchasing guides, the team also examined programs in other states, such as Arizona, which passed ESA legislation in 2011 and offered universal eligibility in 2022.  

Step Up For Students also offers an online purchasing platform for families. The goods and services on the platform are offered by approved vendors. Families don’t have to use the online marketplace and can be reimbursed for expenses if they find other items that fit their child’s needs, or identical items available through other vendors for a lower price. 

“A lot of our families do and will continue to receive funds through reimbursement,” said Catherine Bridgers, senior director for process improvement and risk management at Step Up For Students and leader of the teams that produced the guides. “We don’t want to put families in the position of interpreting statutes themselves or not having clear guidance in making purchases.” 

Tuthill said the guides also help families avoid costly purchases that aren’t allowed and end up being denied.  

“We want to minimize disputes between families and their scholarship funding organizations,” he said. However, he added that the guides are “living documents” and will continue to be revised.  

Among states with ESA programs, Florida is unique in the way it relies on scholarship funding organizations to determine which uses of scholarship funding are allowed under state law. In other states, government agencies make those determinations

The new law requires scholarship funding organizations to agree on purchasing guidelines that will be shared with the state Department of Education and published by the end of the year. Step Up For Students is coordinating with the state’s other scholarship funding organization, AAA, to produce high-level guidelines. However, eligible expenses may differ based on each organization’s policies. Families should check with their scholarship organizations to determine whether an expense is eligible before they make a purchase. The guides include links on the  Step Up For Students website for families using the Educational Options and Unique Abilities scholarships to offer feedback.  

“We use that feedback for continuous improvement,” Tuthill said.  

Each week, Bridgers and her team meet to examine parent feedback and purchases that fall into gray areas in state law. 

A parent recently expressed concern when Step Up asked for more information about a day program for her child, who has Down syndrome. Florida law does not expressly authorize spending scholarship funding on day programs not operated by schools. 

However, Bridgers’ team researched the provider and learned that the founder was certified in recreational therapy. That meant the program met the specifications for part-time tutoring under Florida law, which is eligible for scholarship funding. 

As a result of that feedback, Step Up For Students now approves reimbursements for full-time day programs that meet state specifications for students 16 and older with intellectual disabilities. 

“For this population, these programs are absolutely critical to those students’ development,” Bridgers said. 

Can I get it at a district school? 

Florida’s scholarship laws outline the types of purchases parents are allowed to make with their accounts. Some, like private school tuition, are straightforward. Other provisions of the law, such as one that allows parents to purchase instructional materials, leave more room for interpretation.  

To help determine whether a good or service would be covered by education savings accounts being administered by Step Up, Bridgers and her team asked a key question: Is it offered in a Florida public school? 

“We looked at our own statutes, but we also looked at other state statutes and policies and tried to come up with a public-school equivalency test,” Bridgers said. The team also examined statutes governing back-to-school tax holidays to help guide decisions on supplies. 

“The spirit of this is that these students on ESAs have the same opportunities as public-school students,” Bridgers said. 

That can include sports equipment, such as basketballs. But the guides set limits. The goal is to balance giving families access to a wide range of learning materials (including those a public school might purchase for gym class) while preventing uses of scholarship funds that stray beyond reasonable education-related purchases. Sports equipment can be replaced every two years, according to the guide. 

“You couldn’t get 600 basketballs like the public school district could,” Bridgers said. “We really tried to be comprehensive and thoughtful.”  

Field trips, including tickets to Florida theme parks, are also included as eligible instructional materials for families whose scholarships are managed by Step Up. However, the guide allows reimbursement of only the scholarship student’s ticket.  

“We had a lot of debate about theme parks, Tuthill recalled. “Is a trip to Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World that educational? Well, it was when I went. We said, okay, if a family wants to go to Animal Kingdom, and it’s a field trip, and they built some learning activities around it, how would you manage it? It’s not unusual for public schools to take field trips to a theme park.” 

After all, Tuthill said, “learning can happen in all kinds of situations.” 

Bridgers and Tuthill hope the listings in the Step Up purchasing guides will encourage families to get creative when designing their child’s learning plans. 

That could include an evening at the Florida Orchestra concert or a community theater production. Research has found that taking students to live theater productions is an effective way to teach academic content, increase tolerance by providing exposure to a more diverse world, and improve students’ abilities to recognize what others are thinking or feeling.  

“Our hope is that guardians will sit down with their student learning plans and their students as they look through the guides and they get more ideas to use their funds to create a better experience for their families,” Bridgers said. 

For Hamilton and other parents whose customized programs have not relied heavily on co-ops or other offerings of outside groups, the guides have brought much needed clarity, especially to areas that once were considered gray. 

“This scholarship was started from a place of true understanding of the intersection of learners with unique abilities and the benefits of alternative schooling opportunities, including homeschooling for their ultimate success,” Hamilton said. “I expect that the end result of all the feedback is a guide that is more robust and clear and can be consistently interpreted by the SUFS processors that review all the reimbursement requests, and continues to allow the unique learners on the scholarship to continue to learn in the way that suits them best and be reimbursed for it.”

In 410, after years of enough backstabbing, civil wars and barbarian invasions to make a Games of Thrones scriptwriter blush, the Saxons invaded the Roman province of Britannia. The Roman Britons called upon the emperor for aid, which resulted in what is known as the Rescript of Honorius. In this rescript (a formal reply) Emperor Honorius, distracted by internal rebellion and Visigoth invasion, related “Britannia must look to her own defense.” It was not apparent then, but centuries of Roman rule over Britain ended.

Florida families suffered an Honorius-style rescript of their own in 2020 with the closure of schools. One can only describe the damage suffered by students as horrifying, and it could have been worse. The Florida Education Association, for example, pursued litigation all the way to the Florida Supreme Court in the hope of keeping schools closed. The case went against the FEA, but the message was clear: you are on your own.

Florida families evidently have not forgotten, as Step Up for Students has awarded 410,365 full-time scholarships under Florida’s expanded choice policies. Florida families are filing approximately 1,400 new applications daily. Being less dependent on a group of people eager to throw your children overboard when times get tough apparently appeals to many.

That constitutes a promising start, but it understates the significance of Florida’s new universal eligibility: Every Florida student now has an exit option. The ability to leave and take your money with you isn’t just a form of accountability; it’s the ultimate form of accountability. All Florida students will benefit from the universal expansion of choice regardless of whether they use the program.

American families must look to the defense of their children, and states like Florida have empowered them to do just that. Not coincidentally Americans have been moving to Florida in astounding numbers. Dominoes will accordingly continue to fall.

In 2019, just months away from what became the COVID-19 schooling debacle, this blog included a discussion of Robert Pondiscio’s concept of the “Tiffany Test.” Pondiscio defined students as a “Tiffany” if they had bought into the promise of education but had been let down by the system. The post included the following prediction:

"Maybe it’s a little early, maybe the time is not quite yet, but the day is coming when our K-12 policies will fully and appropriately respect the dignity of families to exercise autonomy in schooling. When that day comes, the unfulfilled, the disappointed, the mistreated, the misfit, and the dreamer will seek better situations for themselves.

They won’t ask for permission but rather will be exercising their rights as free people. Pleading with adults to do what is right won’t be the first or only option. When that day comes, “Tiffany” can speak softly, but her voice will be imperial; the system will center around her at last."

There was no shortage of Tiffany students in 2019 but a great many more beginning in 2020. In Florida and many other states, they’ll be in charge of their own education.

When Apollo Academy opened in Tampa last year, 20 students showed up to participate in the inaugural year of student-led learning.

By the time the Tampa-based school closed for summer break, half that number remained. Some families moved away, while others dropped out of the program.

“We ended up with 10 very happy learners,” said founder Beth Ann Valavanis, an executive who left the corporate world to start Apollo, an Acton Academy affiliate, after a search for future schooling options for her preschool daughter left her unsatisfied. “When we started it was about creating an environment for joyful, happy, lifelong learners, and I feel we did that.”

Valavanis has every reason to call her first year a success. Schools in the Acton Academy network and other small learner-driven schools aren’t the best fit for everyone. Even for those who eventually thrive in that environment, there is an adjustment period, especially for parents who aren’t accustomed to independent learning and the lack of traditional metrics to gauge progress.

A former public school teacher who founded an Acton affiliate in Nevada described it as a “detox.”

“All of that is true,” Valavanis said. “There is a shock at the beginning, and that transition takes longer than we realized it would. Parents were saying, ‘We’re not getting worksheets. We’re not getting graded tests.’”

Students from traditional schools, who were not used to being able to make a move without raising their hand for permission, suddenly were free to take a restroom break or quell their hunger pangs with a snack. Valavanis and her guides told the kids: “You know your body better than we do.”

After five or six weeks, as families adjust to the new model, which trades homework and traditional grades for self-paced, competency-based learning, things change.

“Now we can’t imagine school not being like this,” Valavanis said.

Like other Acton schools, Apollo embraced project-based learning and the Socratic method, in which adults eschew directives in favor of guiding students with questions that help them form their own ideas. Students who felt stressed could visit the calming corner. Students involved in conflicts could visit a friendship tent to work out disagreements. On Fridays, “character callouts” offered an opportunity for students to publicly praise classmates for displays of hard work or positive behaviors they had observed during the week.

Valavanis discovered Acton Academy, a network of small private schools that promotes education as an adventure in autonomy, while looking for acceptable options for her daughter, Emilia. Valavanis, who at the time was new to the Tampa Bay area, wasn’t critical of the A-rated neighborhood public school or faith-based private schools. She just wanted something different. During her morning commute to work, she listened to the audiobook “Courage to Grow: How Acton Academy Turns Learning Upside Down” by Laura Sandefer, an educator who founded Acton Academy with her husband, Jeff, a billionaire entrepreneur from Texas.

Acton began in 2009 with the Sandefers’ two sons and five neighborhood kids in a rented house in Austin, Texas. Jeff Sandefer told reimaginED in a 2022 interview that the plan was to have only one school. But one family moved to California and wanted to start Acton there. Another friend from Guatemala saw Acton during a visit and asked to start an affiliate there.

From there, the concept went viral. Today, Acton has 270 affiliates worldwide, including 15 in Florida.

Valavanis’ school operated last year in a local YMCA after issues with the original location forced it to move. This year, Apollo will operate in space leased from Hyde Park Presbyterian Church in South Tampa. The new location will offer a host of amenities, including a creative makerspace, a renovated playground, a shaded parking lot for a basketball hoop, and a co-working space for parents.

Apollo, which accepts the state’s K-12 education choice scholarships, will offer part time services for families using personalized education plans to customize their children’s educations. So far, 30 students have signed up for the program, which serves learners from kindergarten through sixth grade.

Valavanis said they will take lessons learned from the first year and apply them, including devoting more time to the adjustment period, which Acton calls “Building Our Tribe.”

“It’s not like traditional school, where you jump in the first day, and the teacher has to give 540 instructional hours, so they have to start lesson one, chapter one,” Valavanis said. “It’s about discovering yourself and realizing this is a safe place and getting use to not only asking questions but answering other people’s questions.”

Christina Sheffield’s son, Graham, was soaring ahead of classmates. She wanted a learning environment that challenged him, so she created one herself.

She pulled him out of a private school and created a customized education plan. Using her know-how as a certified elementary virtual school teacher, she enrolled him in a hybrid homeschool co-op and designed projects to enhance the curriculum his former private school as using.

But there was a missing piece in her son's custom education plan: Their neighborhood public school.

That changed when the Tampa Bay area mom received the results of her son’s test for academic giftedness. Now officially identified, Graham, like other gifted homeschoolers, was able to access services offered by his local school district. He started going to a weekly gifted class at his zoned elementary school.

“It was his favorite day of the week,” Sheffield recalled. “After I picked him up on the first day, he said, ‘Mom, I finally feel like I fit in.’ That made my mom’s heart happy.”

Other students in similar circumstances might not be so lucky. Florida law allows homeschoolers to enroll in dual enrollment classes that lead to college credit, free of charge. Students participating in the state's growing array of educational choice options have access to extracurriculars at their local public schools under the state's "Tim Tebow law." But that same guaranteed access does not extend to math class.

Districts can offer homeschoolers access to career and technical courses, or services for exceptional students, included gifted programming for students like Graham. And a new law allows districts to receive proportional funding for any student who chooses to enroll part-time while participating in other educational options.

But they are not required to offer this opportunity.

A new analysis by the advocacy group yes.everykid. evaluated policies in all 50 states and found that states vary widely in policies that grant students access to their local public schools, regardless of where they live or whether they want to enroll full-time.

Florida's policies place it in the top 10 among states, but it has not yet guaranteed that every student has the right to access public schools on their terms.

Among the findings:

• 24 states explicitly outline a policy for nonpublic school students to access public schools.
• 15 states require districts to allow nonpublic school students to access public schools.
• 10 states treat public education access as a student right.

Florida tied with Alaska for ninth place when it came to allowing nonpublic and homeschool students access to public schools. Idaho, which met every criterion used in the rankings, was No. 1, followed by Iowa and Minnesota, which tied for second place.

Though HB 1 codified the option for Florida public school districts to offer part-time enrollment options and receive prorated state funding, it left the decision whether to participate up to the individual districts.

Districts may be reluctant to embrace this new flexibility, and some state policies make this understandable. For example, state class size limits may add to the staffing headaches for districts hoping to accommodate students who enroll part-time.

The new law also creates a process for districts to identify regulatory barriers that are preventing them from responding to the needs of students and families.

For decades, some districts have resisted the oncoming tsunami of new education options. Others have chosen to ride it, and now have new flexibility at their disposal. The question is whether they will capitalize on that flexibility to meet the needs of their students.

The number of Florida families choosing home education jumped nearly nine percent last school year.

The new numbers, based on registration data kept by districts and reported this summer by the state Department of Education, suggest that while the dramatic jump in homeschooling at the height of the pandemic appears to have slowed, the trend is still moving in one direction: up.

Reliable estimates of homeschooling participation are notoriously difficult to come by. These numbers are based on the number of families who registered with their districts as homeschoolers, as required by Florida law.

There is one quirk in the data. While the number of families choosing to homeschool jumped at a relatively high rate, the number of participating students leveled off, growing by just 1.4 percent.

Reasonable people can debate whether the number of families choosing to homeschool or the number of students participating is the more relevant data point. If you have thoughts, please send them my way.

Some learning options that look or feel like homeschooling may not be reflected in these numbers. They do not include students who enroll full time in online public schools or students who enroll in private schools that support learning at home.

Next school year, students will have the option to enroll part time with their local school districts. And students receiving state educational choice scholarships will have the option to enroll in "personalized education programs" that allow them to mix and match different learning options without attending a single school full time.

It's a safe bet that in the coming years, new options will mimic some flexibilities of homeschooling, while remaining legally distinct. Many traditional homeschoolers prefer to keep it that way.

This blurring of the lines means homeschoolers' impact on the overall education landscape may be growing faster than homeschooling itself, as measured by official statistics.