Micro-schools go to sea, in Tampa and beyond

TAMPA — Less than five years ago, dissatisfied with virtual education in the pandemic era, Angela Kral started holding small, in-person classes — just her child and three other families she knew.

Although it began as an informal way to maintain a semblance of normalcy amid global upheaval, Kral said she and the families she worked with sensed an opportunity for something bigger. In the fall of 2020, she left her job at Mitchell Elementary School in Tampa and retired from kindergarten. daughter dropped out of public school and began teaching a group of about 10 students at home. Soon, she said, she had an explosion of interest, not just from families but from fellow teachers who asked to come work with her.

Its bridge, South Tampa Microschool, became a private school in 2022. In this spring, the school took over a building on South Coolidge Avenue that for decades housed a Boys and Girls Club, an after-school suspension facility and an adult fitness center. Classes are still small, 10 to 12 students per teacher in most cases, but enrollment has climbed to 100.

“We’re really stretching the term ‘micro’ now,” Kral said recently as he showed a visitor around the school, a network of small, semi-open classrooms that are furnished with communal tables and soft, hued accents earthly and visible. traditional school desks are missing.

The school’s expansion is a reflection of the larger microschooling movement, which has grown largely under the radar in the years since the pandemic and started to gain mainstream attention. The National Microschooling Center, a nonprofit that works with policymakers and connects schools to resources, estimated last year that the United States had 120,000 microschools serving 1.5 million students. Its CEO, Don Soifer, said in an interview that he believes micro schools now have a “2 percent market share” in the American education ecosystem, a number he expects to grow in the coming years.

Definitive metrics are hard to come by, in part because microschooling is an umbrella term that covers a wide range of structures and philosophies: tiny religious programs, home study groups that meet a few times a week, private schools that target many of the same educational goals that public schools do. What they have in common is an approach that prioritizes small-group learning and teacher flexibility, which advocates sometimes describe as a return to the one-room schoolhouse.

A National Microschool Center survey of 400 schools in 41 states this year found that many students come from public school backgrounds, and most microschool operators are current or former teachers.

“As for the teacher, it’s almost always some version of ‘I love to teach.’ I hate being a teacher,’” said Ryan Delk, founder of Primer Microschools, a venture-backed startup that has established a network of schools in three states, including several in Florida.

Delk grew up in Orlando and was homeschooled by his mother, who had been a public school teacher and taught Delk alongside children from a handful of other families in the neighborhood.

He ended up working in the micro-school world almost by accident, he said: His children were approaching school age, and he wanted them to have the kind of engaging educational environment in which he grew up. At the same time, he said, his friends were “saving up to move to a better school district or spending crazy money on private schools.”

He realized there was a “latent demand” for the kind of tuition he received, he said, especially among families who couldn’t afford fancy private schools. Primer prepares teachers to open their own schools, then gives them a core curriculum and access to a library of optional courses, from community gardening to robotics; the company handles much of the administrative work.

Primer’s first schools were in South Florida — he now has six there — and several more are in the works across the state, including a half-dozen in the Tampa Bay area set to open next fall. Many have “crazy long waiting lists,” Delk said.

The company and the broader movement have found fertile ground in Florida, largely because of its institutional friendliness to school choice, including vouchers that can help families pay for many micro-schools. Another boon came earlier this year with the passage of a law making it easier for schools to be located in a wider variety of spaces, regardless of zoning or local ordinances.

Meanwhile, the state’s relatively low investment in public education has created plenty of experienced teachers who feel burned out by overcrowded classrooms and weekend-consuming paperwork, as Delk described, or, like Kral, restricted of the need to teach to standardized tests. .

But to the extent that Florida’s educational framework makes it receptive to micro-schools, Soifer said, the broader movement doesn’t align neatly with school choice efforts of the past.

“The school choice movement, if you look at the national level where the school choice votes are, they tend to be red states and they tend to be where the votes are more one party or the other, and that has hindered the movement in some ways,” he said. “If you look at micro-schooling, it’s as strong on the left as it is on the right, and maybe stronger.”

In many ways, Kral seems like the antithesis of an emblem of Florida’s school choice landscape. She spent nearly two decades as a public school teacher and vice principal, and her father, Vincent Sussman, was the beloved principal and football coach at Plant High School; he never expected to have a job that didn’t involve public schools. Although South Tampa Microschool accepts the Step Up for Students scholarship, Kral said she is ambivalent about Florida’s approach to incentivizing school choice, which she believes is “dismantling public education.”

But at her school, she said, she sees children — including her own — thriving, while teachers feel invigorated about their work.

“I think the time (public school) didn’t really work for my kids is when I said you have to put those ideals aside and do what’s best for your family,” she said. “And it turned out that what was best for my family was best for many families and other teachers.”