“The way we’ve always structured education is not the way all students learn and thrive,” says Becker, who encourages other educators to launch their own microschools. “As you move up in administrative roles, you get less connected to students so it’s been nice to re-connect, get back to my teaching roots and do something different,” she says.īecker believes the pandemic has created the necessary conditions to spark education entrepreneurship and change, as more parents demand more learning choices for their children. “It’s really re-energized me,” says Becker. For instance, Adamo currently has two autistic children in the program who Becker says have flourished both socially and academically within the microschool setting. She works hard to create a family-centered learning environment that prioritizes parents and customizes learning to each student’s distinct needs.
The microschool employs only certified teachers, something Becker says separates her school from other microschool networks. She plans to open additional Adamo microschools in the coming months.Īdamo uses a blend of hands-on, project-based learning, as well as the digital learning platform, Bright Thinker. Today, the school has 20 students and continues to expand, particularly as parents of children in the local district schools grow increasingly frustrated over mask and classroom quarantine policies. In August 2021, Becker launched the Adamo microschool with 12 students in kindergarten through seventh grade. An educator for over 25 years, Becker has worked in both district and virtual schools as a teacher, administrator, special education director, assistant superintendent, and most recently, as the superintendent of Primavera, Arizona’s largest online school. “Many educators, parents, and policy-makers are starting to see microschools as a format that balances small groups, flexibility and academics,” he adds.Īrizona students attend Prenda microschools tuition-free through the state’s extensive school choice policies that encourage education innovation, including supporting virtual charter school providers such as EdKey, Inc., with which Prenda partners.Īn affiliation with EdKey is what enabled Tamara Becker to quickly launch her microschool this year in Fountain Hills, Arizona. “Between teacher strikes, Covid, and the school board wars, there has been a lot of energy spent in fights between adults, at the expense of kids learning,” says Kelly Smith, Prenda’s founder. Now, Prenda enrolls nearly 3,000 learners across Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, and New Hampshire. When I profiled Prenda in this column in October 2019, the company had 80 microschool locations throughout Arizona, mostly in private homes, serving approximately 550 students. Microschools were gaining traction prior to the pandemic, with microschool networks such as Arizona-based Prenda leading the way. Like doctors creating direct primary care practices, teachers creating microschools helps them to avoid burnout, earn a good living and do fulfilling work with optimal freedom and flexibility. You can make those same correlations to teachers who are seeing more kids, spending less time with each kid, doing more paperwork, dealing with more bureaucracy and teaching to the test rather than being able to be creative,” he says.
“With physicians, there is high burnout from administratively bloated systems, more paperwork, less patient care and less pay. “As our own kids grew, it became clear to us that teachers are suffering from almost the identical problem we are helping doctors with, to an eerie degree,” says Dr. Physicians are able to serve fewer patients with higher quality medical care while earning the same or more than they did in larger, red tape-laden medical practices. Several years earlier, the brothers built Atlas.md, a practice management portal to help physicians strike out on their own with direct primary care practices that offer high-touch, membership-based healthcare services without insurance and related organizational hassles. High levels of burnout, more paperwork and less time for personalized attention plague both doctors and teachers. Josh Umbehr, a family physician in Kansas, who realized the parallels between healthcare and education. Umbehr founded a.school earlier this year with his brother Dr.
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