Editor’s note: This first-person essay from New Mexico mother Ashley Guerra was adapted from the American Federation for Children’s Voices for Choice website. You can learn more about Guerra’s family and her education choice journey by listening to a reimaginED podcast at https://nextstepsblog.org/2022/10/podcasted-new-mexico-siblings-enjoy-customized-education-thanks-to-multiple-choice-mom/.

Education has always been a priority in our family. I was raised to value opportunities and work diligently to pursue areas that would allow me to contribute successfully to our community. As I grew up and became a mother, education remained an integral component of my life and a central focus in our family.

But our educational journey was interrupted when I was unexpectedly diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia during the summer between my son’s kindergarten and first grade years. Because of the aggressive nature of my specific type of leukemia, the intensive treatments would last for years, and we knew we needed to identify a new school model for our son.

We needed an educational environment to help him learn and keep me safe while my treatments continued. We were grateful to discover a new virtual public charter school, Pecos Cyber Academy, and enrolled him in this program.

We discovered this brand-new virtual public charter school that could be attended from anywhere, including our home in New Mexico, from a local public television commercial. The school featured a state-certified and nationally recognized curriculum that gave us access to incredibly talented, knowledgeable, and experienced certified teachers.

We chose this option because we felt confident it would provide our son with an excellent academic experience while ensuring he achieved the academic progress expected of him and his peers. We also were impressed with the flexibility it provided us to work around my treatment requirements and medical appointments.

Our son completed five years at Pecos Cyber Academy. In the years that followed, our daughter attended, and she now is starting her sixth year. Witnessing our children develop areas of specific interest, identify their subject strengths, learn personal accountability, and develop resilience in their learning process has been a true joy.

As Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” Each child is unique, their circumstances are distinct, and our education system should empower all to capitalize on their potential.

Providing academic options enables families to select for their children the school that will create the greatest opportunity to learn, grow, and become contributing members of our society. I believe that families should have the opportunity to seek out the best education option for their children and their circumstances.

The power to select your child’s educational structure creates equity in education and competition within the school system. As educational entities evolve through various academic models, school systems will promote even newer education models to their communities.

This will allow families to access a uniquely specific school program, resulting in a relationship of accountability and partnership between the school institution and the family/child. With this model, everyone wins – students, families, teachers, and the community.

We are grateful for this educational option and the positive results we’ve seen in our children’s academic learning, growth, retention, and enjoyment in the learning process.

Editor’s note: This article from Kerry McDonald, an education policy fellow at State Policy Network and senior education fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education, appeared last week on forbes.com.

A common criticism regarding microschools, learning pods, unschooling approaches and other non-traditional educational models is that they don’t work well for, or exclude, neurodiverse learners, including those on the autism spectrum or those who have dyslexia, ADHD or other special learning needs.

The reality is that these more personalized learning models can work well for most students, and may be especially valuable for students with learning challenges or special needs.

This has certainly been the experience of Molly and Noah Stephenson of Wichita, Kansas. As parents of neurodiverse children who didn’t fit well into conventional schooling, including school-at-home versions of homeschooling, they discovered early on that providing maximum freedom and autonomy for children often leads to the deepest, happiest and most enduring learning.

Their older daughter, who is now 21, still carries with her the painful memory of a kindergarten year in public school that her mother refers to as a “fantastic disaster.” According to Molly: “We realized at the end of kindergarten that she had dyslexia and our public school system was not well-equipped at that time to help her be successful.

“She felt that she wasn’t smart. It was unacceptable to us to have kids that, just because their brains were different, felt like they were not intelligent. We didn’t want to see the love of learning taken away from our kids.”

The Stephensons took their daughter out of school and began homeschooling her and her younger siblings through a virtual school, with a set curriculum and standard performance expectations. Things got better, but they soon realized that their son was also severely dyslexic and that a rigid curriculum didn’t work for him. “He would run and hide,” Molly said of her son’s aversion to schoolwork.

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Editor’s note: This commentary appeared Thursday on courier-journal.com.

Two major educational events took place over the past week. First, the Kentucky Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the lawsuit seeking to block educational choice in Kentucky.

And, the Kentucky Department of Education released standardized test scores for Kentucky public schools from spring 2022. As expected, they reflect a staggering decline in core subjects like reading and math.

Both news events illustrate the urgency for expanding education options in Kentucky.

The issue before the Kentucky Supreme Court is whether the Education Opportunity Account Act is permissible under the state constitution. The EOA Act encourages private donations to nonprofit scholarship programs to help families with educational expenses, ranging from textbooks, technology and tutoring to private school tuition.

Donors who give to the program receive a state tax credit in return for their contribution.

Opponents claim this is the same as spending public dollars on nonpublic schools. But tax credit funded educational choice programs have been on the books for decades in other states.

From the U.S. Supreme Court down to every state supreme court that has heard a similar challenge, no lawsuit seeking to strike down a tax credit funded educational choice program has ever succeeded.

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Editor’s note: This first-person essay from Nevada mother Diana Reyes was adapted from the American Federation for Children’s Voices for Choice website.

I spent many nights crying myself to sleep in frustration at the lack of help my son was receiving at school. So many times, he would come to me with tears in his eyes, saying, “Mom, I am trying my best, but I don’t understand what they are teaching.”

No matter how many tutoring sessions he attended, no matter how many hours he worked, it was the same. His self-esteem dropped and he started isolating from other students.

I pledged that I would find a better path for him, and I did, at a wonderful private school in downtown Las Vegas. I was impressed to learn that Mountain View Christian Schools offer a fully integrated leadership philosophy rooted in the truth of God’s word. Students from preschool through high school are trained in problem solving, teamwork and communication skills.

The only problem was the cost. Once again, I hit a wall. Even if I managed to find a second job, I still wouldn’t be able to afford the tuition. It broke my heart that I couldn’t provide what my son needed – and what children with more affluent parents were enjoying.

Then I heard about a new program that was being approved in our state: the Nevada Opportunity Scholarship Program. Enacted by our state Legislature in 2015, the program mirrors successful tax credit programs in other states such as Florida and Arizona. The Nevada program provides scholarships of up to $8,469 for K-12 private school tuition and fees for families whose household incomes do not exceed 300% of the poverty level.

Put simply, a family of four making less than $83,250 can qualify for this scholarship.

There are five approved scholarship granting organizations in Nevada, which determine when scholarship applications can be submitted. The granting organizations review the applications to determine who will receive the scholarships, which are awarded on a first-come, first-served basis to those who qualify.

We were among the lucky ones.

The Opportunity Scholarship became the answer to my prayers and the end to my sleepless nights – and so much more than that. My son’s teacher at Mountain View got him caught up in six months. I noticed he was more confident and happier, building friendships.

He thrived on the school’s Bible-based curriculum, which aligns with state and national standards and is enhanced with yearly assessments. In addition to core classes, my son benefited from enrichment classes in technology, art, physical education, and music.

My son graduated from Mountain View with a commitment to apply Christian values, leadership training and academic excellence to the needs of the world, just like the website promised.

Today, he is attending the University of Las Vegas-Nevada, the first in our family to attend college. I don’t think this would have been possible if he had not had the opportunity to attend a school that matched his needs.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that this school and the Opportunity Scholarship that made attendance possible for my son changed the course of our family’s future.

Editor’s note: This article appeared last week on captimes.com

Wisconsin's Republican candidate for governor, Tim Michels, has named several “top” policy priorities since winning the party's Aug. 9 primary: preventing crime in Milwaukee, creating jobs, “election integrity,” and outlawing perceived critical race theory in schools.

But the top priority the construction executive has provided the most detail about has been his pledge to bring “competition into the education marketplace” and introduce universal school choice in Wisconsin.

“Competition is a great motivator,” Michels told a crowd in Green Bay last month, a standard line from his stump speech. “In our business, if we're not innovating every day, we're losing. … We are going to create competition. We are going to improve education. And we are going to make sure that future generations of Wisconsinites have the skills to be leaders in this state.”

Implementing universal school choice would be a sweeping overhaul of the state’s K-12 education system — a hot-button election issue as the Nov. 8 general election looms.

In a recent Marquette Law School poll, 71% of independent voters said they are “very concerned” about public schools — the highest of any issue surveyed. There was a strong partisan divide on where funding for schools should go, with 46% of Republicans preferring more money for private schools rather than public schools compared to 45% preferring the reverse.

Among Democrats, meanwhile, 93% would choose more money for public schools and just 5% for private schools.

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Editor’s note: Kind Academy in Coral Springs, Florida, is one of 32 innovative programs chosen as semifinalists for the Yass Prize for educational excellence. Seven finalists and a $1 million grand prize winner will be announced in December. You can find a list of winners here.

Iman Alleyne decided to pursue a career in education for the same reasons many people do: her kids.

A pharmacy employee at the time, Alleyne saw education as a rewarding path that would let her help students while allowing her to spend more time with her son. So, she went back to school and earned a master’s degree in school counseling.

The allure of a daytime, Monday through Friday schedule and summers off soon faded when she saw how high stakes standardized testing had changed the profession.

“They really used us as testing coordinators,” Alleyne said. “I quickly realized that I wouldn’t be able to counsel. That made me sad. I didn’t want to be a testing coordinator. I wanted to counsel and connect with students.”

She noticed that children with special needs were more likely to get in trouble and be referred to guidance counselors, so she got certified in special education so she could work one on one with more kids. Those interactions, along with shrinking recess times and forced silent lunches, opened her eyes. Not liking what she saw, she launched a part-time nature class for moms of toddlers.

Meanwhile, Alleyne’s oldest son hated pre-kindergarten so much that he cried every morning and begged her to let him stay home.

“It was horrible, and it broke my heart every day,” she said. “By the end of the school year, I pulled him out and decided to start homeschooling him.”

That’s the origin story of Kind Academy, a hybrid homeschool and microschool for elementary age students that got its official start in 2016 after a four-year evolution. The name was inspired by the values Alleyne wanted to impart: kindness to self, kindness to others, and kindness to the world.

That’s one of the reasons the school day includes a lot outdoor learning, though the environmental aspect was originally rooted in convenience.

“I had three boys, so it was crazy,” she said. “It was easier to spend a lot of time outside.”

The program quickly grew after other parents found out what Alleyne was doing and asked if their kids could join.

Today, Kind Academy serves 25 students who come for in-person instruction. Options include attendance two, three or five days a week, although most students are part-timers who are homeschooled. The school also offers an online alternative to homeschool parents or those seeking enrichment opportunities for their kids.

The day begins with 10 to 20 minutes of social emotional learning, or SEL – the process of developing the self-awareness, self-control, and interpersonal skills that are vital for school, work, and life success – akin to “circle time.” Then groups of eight to 10 students do individual work at their own pace with help from tutors.

The program is competency-based, with no traditional grades. Instead, students produce portfolios to show they have mastered the material. This method allows student to move ahead in some subjects while taking more time in others.

“We call it Montessori 2.0 or modern Montessori,” Alleyne said, referring to an education model that takes into account the whole child, including physical, emotional, mental, spiritual and social ways of being. Students also participate in project-based learning focusing on a weekly theme, such as marine biology, before they head to lunch. After lunch, they spend the afternoon outside, playing and learning.

“We call it more chances for SEL,” said Alleyne, who witnesses plenty of opportunities for learning and problem-solving, skills students will need as adults. She recently noticed some students engaged in a dispute over a game of tag. They asked her to settle it. Instead, Alleyne encouraged them to work it out themselves, which they did.

Another aspect of Kind Academy’s culture is acceptance of all people, a value made clear in a gender-affirming statement on the school’s website. Alleyne said her students are diverse and include some who are transgender and have experienced bullying.

“I have had parents who called me and were crying,” she said. “Those students come in and feel comfortable saying ‘This is who I am.’ These kids feel valued here. It just makes my teacher heart and my parent heart happy.”

Though Kind Academy is a private school, Alleyne works to keep it accessible to all students regardless of income. She said about 50% of her students come from low-income households. She accepts the Family Empowerment Scholarship for Students with Unique Abilities. But only students with certain special needs qualify for it.

Alleyne hopes that Florida legislators will convert the Family Empowerment Scholarship for Educational Options to an education savings account model so that more students can have access to  high-quality, innovative programs.

“So many families go to public schools because they can’t afford something like what we do,” she said. “If we could access the (FES-EO scholarship program), it would put our program within reach for so many families who want flexibility and personalized learning. We could really grow.”

Growth is definitely on Alleyne’s agenda. It could come sooner rather than later thanks to her school’s inclusion on a list of 32 semifinalists for the coveted Yass Prize, a $1 million award given to a program judged to offer the nation’s best education that is “sustainable, transformational, outstanding and permissionless.”

Kind and the other semifinalists have been awarded $200,000 grants. Alleyne plans to put her grant toward her goal of opening 100 schools in 10 years. She has her sights set on West Palm Beach and Miami.

“Hopefully, we’ll have seven schools in the next two to three years,” she said.

She also plans to offer training to other “edu-preneurs.” Her goal? To encourage more teachers to exercise the freedom to create their own schools. And to answer a request she receives frequently: Please tell me how you did that.

Longtime education choice advocate and founder and chairman of Step Up For students John Kirtley recently joined Paul E. Peterson, editor of Education Next, on the Education Exchange to discuss how choice programs, including tax credits and charter schools, are serving Florida families.

Here is an excerpt of Kirtley’s remarks.

“We have about 3 million kids, K-12, in Florida, whose educations are paid for by the taxpayers. Roughly half of them do not attend their zoned district school … of that 50 percent, the largest category of choice is, in fact, district-run schools of choice, whether they be magnets, the biggest category, [and] there are some districts with a lot of open enrollment, which is great …

The largest category of parents choose schools run by the districts with unionized employees, which is fantastic … You also have about 360,000 kids attending charter schools. You have now almost 250,000 kids attending private schools using taxpayer funds whether directly or indirectly … You have kids taking virtual classes … Now you have parents who are beginning to combine different providers and different delivery methods all at the same time, which I think is the wave of the future."

You can listen to the full podcast here.

JACKSONVILLE, Florida – Not every student at North Florida School of Special Education rides Chief within minutes of meeting the big horse, but that’s what James Guha did one day during the summer of 2021.

Oh, it took some encouraging and a little cajoling from Andrew Sack, the barn manager. Chief is big and a bit ornery. A Paint, he stands 16.2 hands (5.6 feet) tall. He likes to test newcomers to his stall.

James is big, too. He’s 6-foot-3, 220 pounds. But he had never been around horses.

James, 20, who is on the autism spectrum, had just started in NFSSE’s summer program as he prepared to begin his first year in the school’s transition program for adults ages 18-22. Part of his time would be working with the farm animals.

“He was ready to rock and roll and ride horses,” Sack said.

Then James met Chief.

“He’s big,” James said. “Like really big.”

Sack had James pet Chief, then brush him. Then Sack asked James if he wanted to ride the horse. And James was a little …

“Scared to death,” Sack said. “I would be, too, a first timer, but he did it. I love his willpower.”

James settled into the saddle and a friendship was forged.

“I’m starting to warm up to Chief,” James said. “He’s growing on me a little bit, but at the same time, he’s still scary.”

Working with Chief was one of the highlights of James’s first year at NFSSE, a private school in Jacksonville that offers an innovative academic and therapeutic setting for students, ages 6-22, who have intellectual and developmental differences.

Those in the transition program learn functional academics – how to budget money and pay bills, how to read and interpret signs, personal hygiene, job skills. James, who lives an hour from the school in Orange Park, attends NFSSE on a Family Empowerment Scholarship for Students with Unique Abilities, managed by Step Up For Students.

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The simple answer to what makes Jill Perez tick most likely is the wrong one. Just because she never was a fan of masking youngsters, it’s easy — possibly even appealing — to tag her as a denier, a crank, anti-science, or a threat to Granny.

Just stop.

Summon up something besides reflex, and you’ll discover Perez is, in deep-blue New Jersey, a maverick, a purist, a cheerful iconoclast, and a dreamer.

Also, not incidentally, Jill Perez is a resolutely committed yoga and meditation instructor. Accordingly, anything compromising a student’s ability “to have access to oxygen in every single cell in their body” is a hurdle higher than the Himalayas in her world.

Yes, she launched Tranquil Teachings Learning Center in Monmouth, N.J., in the autumn of 2021 when area schools, public and private, refused to budge on their pandemic mandates, particularly masks and distancing.

For an educator and a mom committed to the gospel of total oxygenation swaddled in energetic social interaction, these dictates simply were too much and too long.

Moreover, they struck Perez as a symptom of a debilitating condition that predated COVID-19 by a generation or more.

“A lot of these institutions have become too political,” she says. “They're not serving the needs of the children; they're not serving the needs of the family.”

But wait. There’s more.

“They're not serving the needs of the teachers that are working there, and I've been seeing that happen for a long time,” Perez says. “So, this was kind of in my mind, even before our schools were closed down.”

The wheels began rolling in the 2020-21 academic year. Perez withdrew her two older children from public school over coronavirus mandates, opting for homeschooling. Her two youngest continued to attend a Montessori school that was mask optional.

Like many families, Perez partnered with other parents to organize a small learning-pod community, purchasing a suitable curriculum and hosting round-robin style meetings in their homes for academics, enrichment opportunities, and socialization.

With procedures in place, a pool of students at the ready, and momentum on her side, when mandates remained steadfast in the fall of 2021, Tranquil Teachings was born. In a learning center that operates on a private-membership model (like a gym), students (legally home-schoolers) attend either part or full time.

Everybody moves. Everybody breathes. Everybody thrives.

“What’s different from other places, and what I love,” says Briliana Coleman, whose daughter Sarah attended that first year after the family moved to Bradenton, Florida, “is the kids were exposed to adaptive techniques to adjust to what's going on in the world, or just daily life.

“They do breathing meditation. They run constantly outside when it's between classes and recess … You're allowed to be a human being and enjoy learning.”

Best of all?

“Between a little bit of meditation and breathing and being outside, I know our kids just didn't get sick at all.” That included older daughter Marley, a high school student who sometimes served as a teacher’s aide.

To see where all this began, roll back 21 years to the earliest weeks of Perez’s teaching career. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Perez’s students had a front-row seat to the defining moment of the still-young century.

Through windows looking east to the Manhattan skyline on a morning brilliant with promise, Jersey City middle-schoolers saw the world change: First, one airliner, then another smashed into the Twin Towers, sending thunder and shock rumbling across the Hudson River, a horrific scene exploding with horror and overwhelming panic.

Amid the tumult and the weeping and the screaming, two students — at least two— fainted. Casting aside her lesson plan, Perez assumed her yoga master persona. She moved among the frenzied group, not simply calling for calm, but demonstrating how to achieve it.

Around her, youngsters gasped in spasms, hyperventilating.

“They weren’t getting oxygen,” Perez remembers, “and that was causing problems … I had the kids relax and breathe deeply.”

That was Round 1 of the Awakening of Jill Perez. Round 2 commenced a week later when schools reopened to students still dazed and jittery about this bizarre new world where strangers flew airplanes into buildings.

“It caused me to reflect about what it meant to be an educator,” Perez says. First and foremost, “I had to make [students] feel safe.”

Certified in math and social studies, Perez relied on her yoga training to set the mood for each class. Breathing exercises slid ahead of algebra formulas, stretching linked arms with the shortcomings of the Articles of Confederation, and soothing melodies became the soundtrack to learning.

“Those were fundamental pieces of teaching children that I really didn't get in my teacher preparation,” she says.

Over the next 20 years, much of it spent in the supervision of student teachers for Rutgers University and Seton Hall, Perez could not help reflecting on the day everything shifted and how — especially in schools — the aftershock of 9/11 urged fresh thinking.

“The greater purpose of teaching,” she says now, “is to show students how to be educated, how to think.”

For Perez, that meant rejecting traditional industrial schooling to “create an experience that is true to who [students] are.”

Coleman, the Bradenton mom, reports daughters Sarah and Marley have adjusted well to their public school surroundings in Manatee County, “But I wish we could have brought Tranquil Teachings with us. Sometimes I miss it so much I just cry.”

In its second year, Tranquil Teachings has acquired acreage adjacent to its rented commercial space, providing sufficient room for romping and a small farm. With a certified horticulturist on board for expert guidance, students plant and harvest seasonally: beans, cabbage, blueberries, peppers, carrots, onions. They’re looking forward to taking their bounty to local farmers’ markets.

“The farm really has been such a blessing and such a gift,” Perez says. “It’s one of the components that makes us really different.”

Tranquil Teachings has 42 students participating this year in grades K-6, with tentative plans for growth. Because her heart always has been with middle-schoolers, Perez has begun talking with her board about expansion. The 1890s farmhouse that accompanied the acreage seems like the perfect long-term home.

Perez laments that the New Jersey Legislature is unfriendly to measures that allow tax dollars to follow students, or even statutes that encourage the private or corporate funding of education savings accounts.

“But I will say,” she adds, “we do have some people in our state senate and assembly who are working to strengthen home school laws because they are seeing the need.”

Jill Perez began seeing the need for new teaching and learning models on the fateful day the towers fell. Inhale deeply. Exhale completely. That’s not a rejection of masks you’re feeling; it’s the head-cleansing rush of innovation.

Editor’s note: This article first appeared on www.newsandsentinel.com.

The board governing West Virginia’s expansive educational savings account program approved provisions Wednesday to re-start the program after the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals lifted an injunction blocking it.

The Hope Scholarship Board met last week for the first time since this summer after a lower court ruling granted a permanent injunction halting the program. The board approved amendments to the emergency rule that set out how the educational savings account program operates.

The approved amendments will allow the State Treasurer’s Office to send out Hope Scholarship funds to families approved by the board by Jan. 15, 2023, for both the first semester and the second semester of the 2022-23 school year.

The amendments will also empower the board to develop a plan for sending out Hope Scholarship funds to parents who had to return their students to the public school system on a prorated rate for the time the student spent in either private/religious school or home school.

Families who were previously approved by the board for Hope Scholarship funds remain eligible for funds and will not need to apply again, including parents who placed their children back into public school. Those parents will need to decide by January if they wish to continue in the Hope Scholarship program or keep their children in public school and forfeit the funds.

“We’re going to approve within this rule the ability to essentially pay everybody who had been awarded the Hope Scholarship previously and who had gone on and chosen a path, whether it be private school, or some individualized learning plan, like home school,” said State Treasurer Riley Moore in a press conference prior to the Hope Scholarship Board meeting.

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