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I o l sp f o red choIcE Born out of the pandemic, the microschools movement takes off By CLAIRE FORTIER
COURTESY RICHMOND PRIMARY SCHOOL
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cross the country, public school enrollment fell drastically in 2020. Enrollments declined nationally by nearly 3%; Virginiaʼs public schools lost 45,000 students, or 3.5%. Excluding Richmond, which saw an enrollment increase on paper because the district then housed a statewide virtual education program, Chesterfield, Henrico and Hanover counties collectively saw a 3.3% decline in enrollment. Where did those students go? Traditional private schools were an obvious choice for many. But for others, remote learning led to homeschooling co-ops that gradually morphed into microschools. These groups, usually comprising around 15 students from different families, often met in homes, church basements, converted garages or wherever their parents could improvise a classroom. The breaking point was 18 months of remote learning that satisfied almost no one. Gov. Ralph Northamʼs March 2020
stay-at-home order shut down Virginia schools, which didnʼt fully reopen until fall 2021. “Zoom school was terrible, awful. I know because I ran a charter school at the time,” says Amanda Simmons-Polanco, a career educator who now owns Vida Academy, a Henrico-based microschool for children ages 4 to 9 that specializes in bilingual education. Necessity is the mother of invention, so parents and educators fed up with remote learning began to rethink education altogether, building on an undercurrent that had been growing for years. “Around 2005, homeschooling was gaining traction,” says Devon Copeland, the founder and executive director of Iron Village Preparatory Academy, a project-based microschool at the St. Luke Legacy Center in Richmond. “There were different models starting to crop up even then.” The pandemic accelerated that shift dramatically. Statewide, it triggered the largest movement to private education
in Virginiaʼs history, according to Weldon Cooper Center data, with the number of homeschoolers — including children with religious exemptions — rising 48%, from 44,226 in fall 2019 to 65,571 in fall 2020. Spurring those changes was the nascent microschool movement. Parents could now choose a teaching philosophy as deliberately as they chose a school: project-based or self-directed, bilingual immersion or culturally rooted community learning, outdoor exploration or entrepreneurial focused. Beyond simply adding more private school options, there is now an entirely different axis of choice.
LOOKING BEYOND THE CLASSROOM “So many of these schools started as cohorts, almost like a nanny share,” says Allison Lui, owner of The Schoolhouse Scout. “Many of the stay-at-home parents were former educators who took on helping the kids. When students could return to in-person learning, many opted to continue with the cohort style. It was out of necessity. ... Now a lot of them
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