In the rural village of Wayne, Ohio—population 840—a new microschool is opening this month. Founded by Pam Frankforther, a longtime public school teacher, Pioneer Reading Center has already reached its enrollment capacity for this inaugural year, with a waitlist of elementary and middle school students who are seeking a literacy-focused alternative to conventional schooling. Frankforther is among a growing number of entrepreneurial parents and teachers launching innovative, affordable schools and learning spaces in rural areas, helping to expand education options for families in these communities.
After nearly 20 years as a teacher, Frankforther handed in her resignation earlier this year to become an education entrepreneur. It was not an easy decision. When she got hired five years ago as a reading intervention teacher in the nearby public elementary school, she loved it. Frankforther and her family had recently moved to this community, where her husband grew up. Her children attend the local public schools.
“I thought this was my dream job, so I was really disappointed when I felt like it wasn’t going to work out,” Frankforther told me during a recent podcast interview.
Frankforther grew increasingly troubled by the way reading was being taught in school. After listening to the acclaimed podcast series “Sold A Story,” hosted by Emily Hanford, which exposed the widespread use of “balanced literacy” approaches in schools across the country, Frankforther believed that a more science-backed, phonics-rich approach to reading and literacy would better serve students. She and a small team of colleagues tried to make change from within. “I was basically told to just stay in my lane and do what was best for the school, which is test scores. That didn’t sit right with me,” she said, adding that she recently wrote a book explaining in more detail how students—especially those with dyslexia and related learning needs—are being left behind by current literacy practices in public schools.
The positive community response to news of her full-time microschool, which serves about a dozen students in third through seventh grade, was almost immediate. Parents of students with reading challenges were delighted to have a new option for their children—particularly one that is tuition-free. Students attending Pioneer Reading Center are legally considered homeschoolers, but many are able to attend the microschool at no cost through Ohio’s Jon Peterson Special Needs Scholarship Program, one of the state’s eight private school-choice programs. Frankforther says most of her students were previously enrolled in local public schools.
According to data from the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics, about one in five students—or nearly 10 million children—attend a public school in a rural area. Historically, rural students have been more likely to be homeschooled and less likely to attend a private school than students in more populated areas. A report earlier this year published by the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, found that only about one-third of families in rural areas had a private school located within five miles of their home.
The growing ranks of school founders like Frankforther, along with the expansion of school-choice programs across the U.S., are leading to more creative schooling options for students—including those in rural areas with a paucity of such options. In some of these areas, microschools and related learning models are becoming sought-after solutions.
Denise Lever sees this shift in her rural community of Eager in Apache County, Arizona. In this town of roughly 4,400 residents, Lever launched the area’s first microschool in 2020 with seven students. A former wildland firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service, Lever homeschooled her three children through high school. Her youngest was an eighth grader when the pandemic hit and neighbors began asking Lever if she would homeschool their children during that time of education upheaval.
The families appreciated the individualized attention and core curriculum focus of the microschool, which Lever opened through Prenda, a national microschool network that began in Arizona in 2018. As Lever’s microschool reached enrollment capacity with about a dozen students, she began to encourage other parents in her area to open their own microschools. She eventually created a consortium of microschools, called TrailBlazEd, that today includes 10 microschools and nine guides across multiple locations in her region of Round Valley, which includes the towns of Eager and Springerville (pop. 1,700), serving 100 students of all grade levels. Lever estimates that about 8% of school-age students in Round Valley are enrolled in one of these microschools.
I asked Lever about the lack of education choices in many rural communities. “We can build it. We have the responsibility to build,” Lever replied. She sees microschools as shaping the future of education in rural communities across the country. “Microschools not only empower students, they also empower moms and families to take back the education of their students and to be more involved,” she said.
Arizona’s school-choice programs, which enable all K-12 students to use a portion of state-allocated education funding toward microschools like Lever’s, help to spur more education entrepreneurship in rural communities and create more learning options.
While some rural areas may have had a dearth of education options in the past, these communities are increasingly benefiting from the entrepreneurial spirit that is prompting parents and teachers across the U.S. to open new microschools.
For Frankforther in rural Ohio, becoming a microschool founder has restored her love of teaching, and she encourages others to follow this entrepreneurial path in communities of all sizes. “I didn’t want to be in a job my whole life that I was miserable in,” she said. “And I would say to other people, you don’t have to be miserable in your job either. You can take the tools and the skills that you have and you can make something fabulous for yourself and for your students.”