DADE CITY, Fla. – A friend told Sarah Jones a few years ago she should open her new petting zoo to homeschool groups, but Sarah didn’t think that would go over too well. She didn’t know much about homeschoolers, and the stereotypes in her head told her their parents wouldn’t warm to a tattoo-covered building contractor with a salty vocabulary.
But then the friend persuaded Sarah to bring her animals to a fundraiser for mental health programs. Homeschoolers with special needs were in attendance. One little girl, autistic and nonverbal, was smitten by a pony dressed up like a unicorn. She brushed it for hours. And when she got home, according to a note her mother sent to event organizers, she spoke her first words, telling Mom, “I love you.”
Sarah saw it as another flashing sign in what had become an undeniable string of signs. Her life was headed in a different direction.
Now she runs Florida Farm School, an à la carte learning provider rooted in land and livestock that serves about 50 homeschool students.
Once a week, on Mondays or Thursdays, families bring their pre-school- to middle-school-aged kids to Sarah’s 20-acre spread in the sand hills 45 minutes north of Tampa. Over the course of four hours, they learn how to grow their own food, make their own medicine, build things with their hands, and, more than anything, interact and care for more than 100 animals.
In the process, they learn even deeper lessons. Responsibility. Resilience. Compassion. Curiosity. The value of hard work. The value of teamwork.
Maybe even how to pause and evaluate what really matters.
“When you live in the city, it’s constant noise,” said Sarah, who grew up 60 miles away, in Florida’s most densely populated county. “Go to one of these (Tampa Bay) neighborhoods and tell me if you can hear the birds sing. No wonder we’re all so full of anxiety.”
“Here,” she continued, “the innocence of pure joy every day is infectious.”
Homeschooling on steroids
Florida Farm School is a sweet, quirky story unto itself. But it also represents another big shift in public education in America, with Florida again leading the way.
More than 150,000 students in Florida are now using state support to learn completely outside of full-time schools, up from 8,000 five years ago. Think of it as homeschooling on steroids. Their parents are using flexible state scholarships, aka education savings accounts, to customize their educational programming by mixing and matching from an ever-growing menu of providers. This “à la carte education” is taking shape in more and more states as ESAs gain traction, but nothing on Florida’s scale is happening anywhere else in America.
Sarah Jones would seem to be an unlikely pioneer, except that now, in a state where education choice is the new normal, anybody with a good idea can give it a shot in an education marketplace that gets more vibrant by the day. The number of à la carte providers that aren’t schools now tops 7,000, nearly four times as many as two years ago. Tutors and therapists are the biggest categories, but untold numbers of unconventional providers like Florida Farm School are entering the mix, too.
‘A wildfire of positivity’
Sarah’s background is in business, not education.
She owned a moving company. Then, a residential cleaning company. Then, a construction company. The latter installed cabinets and counters for thousands of new homes all around the Tampa Bay area.
After COVID-19 hit in 2020, things began to change in Sarah’s world. First, little by little. Then, in a revelation.
The way Sarah sees it, “this was my fate,” she said. “I never planned this.”
One day at the baseball field, watching her youngest son play, Sarah spied somebody’s renegade pet rabbit roaming next to the field. She caught it … and took it to a farm she had recently visited … which led to more visits … and to riding horses …
Next thing you know, Sarah and the owner were discussing the possibility of opening an indoor livestock petting zoo, and Sarah began acquiring animals at auction. Ultimately, she decided to go it alone on her land in Dade City, which she had originally bought to develop into ranchettes.
That’s when things started taking a more dramatic turn.
“It’s magic out here,” Sarah said. “I heard the leaves in the trees and birds singing, and it changed me. I couldn’t remember the last time I heard that. I asked myself, ‘How much of this have I missed?’”
Other incidents besides the girl and the pony/unicorn began leaving a deeper impression. Sarah recalled two elderly women who visited the farm, giggling and reminiscing as they sat with baby goats in their laps. Another time, after the farm began serving homeschoolers in 2023, the kids learned how to build herb walls. Then, on their own initiative, some of them went home and taught their neighbors.
What Sarah thought was a simple lesson turned out to be “a wildfire of positivity,” she said.
'No kid is forgotten'
The farm is a multi-dimensional enterprise.
Sarah occasionally takes in farm animals that have been neglected or abandoned. She plans to breed “minis,” little versions of cows, donkeys, and other farm animals that are in growing demand as novelty pets. She also hopes to sell a few acres to a group that wants to cultivate a food forest, a forest-like garden full of edible plants.
A handful of parents help with the learning activities, and in some cases, lead them. As a team, they’ve taught the kids how to make everything from laying boxes for chickens to candles, soap, and ice cream.
Farm chores are central. The kids muck pens, scrub water buckets, gather eggs. They watch live births and bottle-feed babies. Some of them have taken piglets home and fostered them.
The menagerie in their midst is growing. It now includes at least 50 chickens, 15 turkeys, 15 ducks, 15 cows, 13 pigs, six dogs (not counting a litter of puppies), five donkeys, two goats, two raccoons, and a mule.
The school, though, is the farm’s heart.
The educational offerings are expanding, too. Science activities just kicked off on Fridays, anchored by another à la carte provider, a mobile STEM academy.
Sarah said many of the families served by Florida Farm School are of modest means. They wouldn’t be able to access the school without the choice scholarships.
Andreea Barron said her family is one of them. She’s a former public school teacher. Her husband is in the military.
She said that in six months, the school has been life-changing for her 6-year-old son, Beckham, who uses a scholarship for students with special needs.
Beckham was enrolled in one of the area’s highest rated public schools. Andreea was a teacher there. But while he was excelling academically, he was struggling socially. Andreea decided to homeschool and eventually heard about the farm school.
“He’s blossomed so much,” she said. “The animals are his therapy. The people here and the animals teach him confidence. They make sure no kid is forgotten.”
“You know it in your heart that this is home,” she continued. “I’ll never let go of this.”
Sarah said she won’t either. Once you realize what’s possible when you have “the freedom to explore, and to breathe, and to be you,” she said, you don’t go back.
Maybe public education is learning the same lesson.