A blog post cannot begin to reveal everything that has been going on - or how many times I have cried in the past week or so. I swear, someone looked at me strangely the other day and I burst into tears. Then they called me to apologize later and I cried again. My friend tried to warn me and she was not kidding. This is not easy work.

It’s fine. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.

This week, our founding team finally had to have a serious discussion considering our location, staffing, funding, and programing.

Originally, our goal was to serve the upper-elementary students who would need a place to learn when their current school did not have a place for them. Then, through conversations with other families, we changed our ages to 6-12, thinking we could serve the siblings of those who were going to originally come. We also wanted to have options for part-time attendance to accommodate many of the homeschooling families in the area. This was our ideal (and still is).

Yet, as we came to the reality of staffing, location, programming, and what we know about the developmental progression of how children learn, we came to realize that a program that served children 6-12 this first year would not be fully meeting the needs of any of those students. If we could not keep children safe and provide them with a meaningful educational experience better than they would get at another school, we did not see how we could ethically offer that age span.

Sadly, we realized that our only reason for offering that age span was not because of any educational opportunity that it would allow, but because it would work for the families we want to serve. Which we know is no small thing. Not only are these families and children we love and want in our community, but they are also our friends and our children’s friends.

And yet - could we truly offer what we want to offer this first year if we stretch ourselves beyond what we know we can do?

We looked at other models and walked through what each program would look like with the different age ranges. We thought about how we would accommodate the age span, but we kept coming back to the funding, staffing, and location. Could we do it and provide everyone with what they need to the best of our ability?

The answer, finally, in our heavy hearts, was no. Not this year.

Another micro-school is forming in town and we have heard it plans to start slowly - adding one grade a year, starting with preschool. Although they hope to one day offer preschool through middle school, they are going to honor the process as they grow. We realized we needed to do that as well.

And so, we have set boundaries for our pilot year. We will only serve ages 8-12, and, unfortunately, at this time we plan to only take full-time students. We are carefully looking at the make-up of this first class. We hope to have 20% of the students with disabilities, as well as to be able to offer scholarships to families in need. We want our model to serve all students, and in order to be able to test the model and prove that it will appropriately serve all students, we need to keep our pilot year tight.

This was a hard week. And we know there are harder weeks out there. This process has been extremely humbling and is doing a lot to teach us that what we see as our dream school will take longer than a few months to accomplish. We are readjusting our focus to be both on opening the doors in September 2023, as well as staying focused on what the school will look like in five years - when we do believe our dream school will take shape.