By Lea Konczal – Data Reporter, St. Louis Business Journal
Oct 18, 2019, 7:00am EDT
Shall we kick off our morning meeting?” Sarah Wallus Hancock asks, sitting cross-legged on a “rag rug” professionally woven out of fabric scraps.
“Community meeting,” a child elaborates, munching on a carrot stick.
“Yes, community meeting,” Wallus Hancock says. Thus begins a typical morning at The Children’s Community, a one-room schoolhouse in Fenton. Two adults and four children sit in a circle on the rug, taking turns discussing what they plan to accomplish for the day.
Wallus Hancock and her fellow teacher, Emily Pankratz, are in their first year running one of St. Louis’ first microschools. But they’re not alone. In Missouri and across the nation, the one-room schoolhouse is making a comeback.
Like The Children's Community itself, the concept of a microschool is hard to define. Each private, tuition-based institution typically has fewer than 10 students, who range from 5-year-olds to teenagers. All ages learn together in a single classroom. There’s no homework. School often meets fewer than five days a week. Classwork is customized to a large extent by the students, based on which passions they want to pursue. Most significantly, the schools are “learner-driven,” meaning the worst thing a teacher can do is answer a student’s question.
“Does ‘way’ have a ‘y’ at the end?,” asks 7-year-old Archer, struggling to write a self-assigned composition.
“What feels right to you?” Wallus Hancock says.
“Mommy, just tell me what’s right!” (Archer and his brother, 10-year-old Randolph, are Wallus Hancock’s children. The school’s other two students, aged 5 and 7, are Pankratz’s daughters.)
Wallus Hancock is undaunted. “What did we learn about spelling based on the word ‘may’?”
Archer eventually gets it. His thought process illustrates the goal of learner-centered microschools. By helping children learn for themselves, they aim to build lasting knowledge — and more importantly, problem-solving skills students can use in the real world.
Wallus Hancock and Pankratz, both former public school teachers, established their school as a limited liability company so they could get it up and running more quickly. They financed the schoolhouse’s construction and pay for its day-to-day operations with personal funds. While they plan to charge $5,400 per student per year, plus a $100 materials fee per semester, they have a rule that educators’ children are tuition-exempt. They aim to attract a larger class (15 students maximum) by inviting children and parents from local homeschooling groups to visit. Current open house opportunities include monthly tea times and a paid summer camp.
The Children’s Community is competing with a small but fast-growing crop of miniature private schools in the St. Louis region. Saint Louis Sudbury School, which says it offers “fully self-directed education” for students ages 5-18, also started this year. Ambleside Christian Academy, a more loosely defined “alternative education” school that meets twice a week, is in its fourth year.
And then there’s Lighthouse.
The child as hero
“Hello, you have reached Lighthouse International Academy, where heroes find a calling and change the world.”
So promises the cheery voice on Lighthouse International’s answering system. The voice belongs to Eliza Rivas, a former public school teacher who quit her job to open Lighthouse International this fall.
Call Lighthouse anytime between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. on a weekday, and you’ll probably get the recording. Rivas herself will be in the classroom, acting as a “guide” to the three self-directed “learners” that comprise the school’s inaugural crop of students — a 5-year-old, a 7-year-old and Rivas’ 10-year-old daughter. Tuition is $780 per month, plus a $200 enrollment fee.
These children are referred to as “heroes,” each of which is on a “hero’s journey” to find his or her passion and change the world.
“As an adult you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s a little bit corny,’” Rivas said. “But then when you get into what that means, it’s actually phenomenal.”
When a student gets frustrated, Rivas approaches them with a specific dialogue: “This is your hero work; this is your challenge,” she says. “What are you going to do to overcome that? How do you calm yourself? How are you going to come back at it?”
“And then when they do — which they always do — and they try again and they get it, we celebrate that success,” Rivas said. “We say, ‘You overcame that. That was hero work right there.’ And you just see them beam with pride.”
Microschools writ large
The hero approach isn’t something Rivas made up — it’s the brainchild of a serial entrepreneur in Austin, Texas.
Jeff Sandefer started his first company at age 16. After founding and co-founding several other ventures, he started the Acton School of Business, an MBA program in entrepreneurship that employs the Socratic method of discussion-based learning. In 2009, he and his wife adapted the model for children ages 5-18 by founding a mixed-age, one-room school called Acton Academy. In 10 years, the organization has grown from one location in Austin to more than 200 affiliate schools around the world.
Lighthouse International is the first Acton affiliate to open in Missouri. Rivas and her husband went through a rigorous application and training process before they could open the school’s doors this fall. They paid a $15,000 orientation fee and owe Acton Academy 3% of their tuition revenue. Tuition royalties are used to provide all Acton affiliates with game-based learning tools.
Unsurprisingly, Sandefer’s entrepreneurial bug has made its way into the curriculum. Acton Academy maintains a bank of projects, known as “quests,” which affiliate schools can pick for their students to complete over multi-week sessions. Quests can be about anything from gardening to toymaking. One of the original quests, which Rivas picked for her school, is an entrepreneurship module in which students develop mock businesses and then pitch their startup ideas at a business fair.
“It’s really set to create adults who are truly prepared for the 21st century,” she said.
Schools for the future?
Today’s schools, Acton proponents might argue, train kids for yesterday’s jobs. They put children in rows of desks, assembly line style, drilling the same information into each student’s head. Critics say that system prepares students to be loyal cogs in a corporate machine.
A learner-driven microschool, by contrast, is modeled after and designed for the modern workplace — a world of open offices, changing technology and personal-growth concepts like self-actualization.
But do these institutions actually do a better job than public schools or more traditional private schools? Do “learners” or “heroes” grow up to change the world in a more impactful way than “students?”
It’s hard to say just yet. Acton Academy’s first class of three learners graduated in Austin last May. One young woman, a National Merit Scholar, was accepted into the University of Texas at Dallas on a full merit scholarship. Another received a full merit scholarship to the University of San Francisco, but deferred enrollment for a year so she could travel the world as an education consultant for Acton affiliates. The third student, according to Acton, also opted to defer college to pursue an undefined “plan for success and fulfillment as a video game producer.”
At 2 p.m. back at The Children’s Community, Pankratz and Wallus Hancock gather the learners into a circle for their closing community meeting. Archer’s 10-year-old brother, Randolph, is moody after a stressful reading session. The adults struggle to get him to tell the class what he plans to accomplish tomorrow. He’s supposed to be writing a self-assigned fantasy story, but it’s unclear when that will get done or if it’s even started.
If Pankratz and Wallus Hancock are perturbed, they don’t show it. The school’s inaugural year, they say, holds as many new challenges for them as it does for the kids.
“Just as they’re learning,” Pankratz says, “we are too.”