LiberatED Podcast

Nick Lachen is a former high school physics teacher with a Master's degree in teaching who, along with his wife, decided back in 2020 to launch a self-directed Sudbury-model school in the Des Moines, Iowa area.  The state told them they couldn't. Iowa has some of the most restrictive private school regulations in the US, constraining the entire private education sector there long before introducin...

Tamara Becker has been an educator for over 25 years, working in both district and virtual schools as a teacher, administrator, special education director, assistant superintendent, and most recently, as the superintendent of Primavera, Arizona's largest online school.  I n August 2021, she launched her first tuition-free  Adamo microschool with 12 students in kindergarten through seventh grade in...

Mara Linaberger worked for 25 years as a public school educator, teacher trainer, and administrator. She has a doctorate in Instructional Technology and has become a leader in the microschooling movement, launching her organization,  Microschool Builders , in 2018 that helps to support microschool founders around the world. Mara's book, The Micro-School Builder's Handbook , is a wonderful resource...

Melissa Mohr worked for 17 years as a teacher and an administrator in a traditional private school in West Virginia, but last year she and some of her colleagues decided to venture out on their own to create a microschool. Her City on a Hill microschool opened in Bridgeport, West Virginia in September 2022 with about 50 kids and continues to attract families who want an alternative to a convention...

Amar Kumar, founder of KaiPod Learning , recently introduced a new program called KaiPod Catalyst which helps entrepreneurial parents and educators to launch a microschool in their local community. One of the entrepreneurial parents who has teamed up with KaiPod is Ben Ashfield, who was on the podcast in September talking about his New Jersey microschool, The Village Electric . In this episode, Be...

JeVonne Tanner worked as a public high school biology teacher but she and her husband Paul grew increasingly frustrated by the constraints of a conventional classroom, including for their own children. They began to look for something different and discovered Acton Academy, a network of independently-owned and operated microschools that was launched in 2010 and now have more than 280 affiiliated m...

After many years of stay-at-home motherhood and homeschooling her 6 children in Florida, Candace Lehenbauer wanted to do something different. She decided to create Tapestry Academy , a home-based microschool in Boca Raton. Candace also runs MicroschoolFlorida.com , a resource directory of microschools in South Florida. Case study of South Florida education entrepreneurship, produced for the VELA E...

Today's guest is Susan Safra, founder and director of Flex Learning Academy , a microschool in South Florida and one of the many innovative education options that are sprouting in that area.  Sign up for Kerry's free, weekly email newsletter on education trends at fee.org/liberated .

Before joining Empower Mississippi and spearheading Embark , a microschool accelerator, Elyse Marcellino helped to launch a classical charter school in Georgia, worked as a classroom teacher for several years, and earned a graduate degree in education from Harvard University. Today, she is helping to activate microschools in her home state of Mississippi, while creating a blueprint for others to f...

Cassidy Younghans taught in conventional schools for 5 years before shifting her focus toward self-directed education. She interned at several prominent self-directed learning settings across the U.S. before becoming a cofounder of a full-time, self-directed learning center in Dallas. She learned a lot from that initial entrepreneurial experience, and in 2021 founded Wild Roots , a grassroots self...

Jenny Clark is an Arizona mother of 5 who has been working vigorously over the past several years to expand education options for families, as well as help parents across the country gain a better understanding of the various options available to them. She is the creator of LoveYourSchool.org which is a fantastic platform that highlights various education options and also provides practical learni...

Candace Fish planned to open a microschool with just a few students, but when the former public school teacher launched her low-cost private school, Freedom Preparatory , this August, she had over 130 students signed up. Parents in Wichita, Kansas, as elsewhere, are looking for more education options, and a collaborative entrepreneurial community is creating them.  Sign up for Kerry's free, weekly...

In August, Michael Parsons opened Vandalia Community School as a microschool in Charleston, West Virginia serving about 10 students with two teachers. Infused with Montessori principles and focused on ample outside time, Vandalia serves a diverse group of learners. With the implementation of West Virginia's new Hope Scholarship Program, a near-universal education savings account for K-12 students,...

Gayle Nagle and Maura Duignan founded the Sligo Sudbury School in Sligo, Ireland in 2018. The Sligo Sudbury School is one of dozens of Sudbury-style schools around the world that are modeled after the original Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts that was founded in 1968. Sudbury schools value freedom and autonomy, non-coercive learning, personal responsibility, and democratic self-g...

Homeschooling parents Toni and Uli Frallicciardi run Surf Skate Science in South Florida, offering weekly classes for approximately 250 homeschoolers and microschoolers in the greater Fort Lauderdale area each semester. They blend their passion for surfing and skating with their interest and background in science and engineering to create hands-on lessons for local students, as well as for young p...

Pam McEwen is a longtime educator and former certified teacher in the public schools in Wichita, Kansas who decided to launch a tutoring center in 2019. Amidst the education disruption of 2020, parents urged Pam to turn her tutoring center into a full-time, in-person microschool. So, she resigned from the school district to run the  Izora Elaine Dean Education Center full-time. Sign up for Kerry's...

Matt Bowman began his career as a public school teacher and quickly recognized the ways in which educational technology could act as both an accelerator for education entrepreneurs and as an access point for families who want a more customized, personalized, self-directed approach to education. He launched My Tech High in 2008 and now works directly with public school districts across the country,...

Like many educators today, including some that have been on this podcast, Jon England was a longtime public school teacher who left the classroom to pursue other education-related opportunities. He worked in the public schools for 14 years teaching 5th and 6th grades, and also worked as an elementary school administrator. Jon received his bachelor's degree in elementary education from the Universi...

Donna Akers had been a public school special education teacher for almost 30 years when she retired in 2020 and decided to launch Ivy Greene Academy , an affiliate of the highly-regarded and fast-growing Acton Academy microschool network. Not only is Ivy Greene the only Acton Academy in all of Mississippi, it is located in the rural town of Pontotoc in an area with almost no other private educatio...

When Stephanie Harper decided to open Harper Learning Academy in Byram, Mississippi in August, her goal was to create a small, personalized educational setting in which her daughter would thrive. Conventional classroom environments weren't a good match for Harper's child. They also weren't working well for the daughter of Harper's colleague, Tekeeta Funchess. Harper and Funchess had been longtime...

Happy Thanksgiving! There is so much to be grateful for.

Maria Casco is a former Montessori teacher who launched a microschool, CASCO Learning , in St. Louis, Missouri. Her journey toward education entrepreneurship began in 2020 when some local parents urged her to create a "pandemic pod." That pod has now evolved into an established learning center for homeschooling students of all ages, with a focus on Spanish language immersion, self-directed learnin...

Kelly Smith launched the first Prenda learning pod in his Arizona home in early 2018 with 7 children, including his son. Today, Prenda has reached over 10,000 learners in hundreds of pods, with the help more than 1,000 educator-guides in 5 states. On today's episode, Kelly talks about the growth of Prenda, the rising popularity of microschools and learning pods, and why aspiring education entrepre...

I'm sure many parents will relate to the story of my guest today, Elizabeth McMeans. Elizabeth's pathway to education entrepreneurship stemmed directly from her efforts to find a more nurturing, personalized educational environment for her son as he approached kindergarten age. He would have been one of the youngest in his kindergarten class, and that concerned Elizabeth as she saw the ways in whi...

Acton Academy was one of the very first national microschool networks to get started back in 2010, before microschools, or small, mixed-age, personalized learning environments, became one of the fastest-growing and most popular educational trends of the 21st century. Founded in Austin, Texas by Laura and Jeff Sandefer, Acton Academy now has about 280 independently run but Acton-affiliated schools...