TAVERNIER, Fla. – Every year, millions of students across America learn the foundational concept of place value in math. But it’s a safe bet few of them learn it at the beach.
At the first microschool in the Florida Keys, that’s exactly what a handful of kindergartners and first graders were doing with their teacher last week. Standing in the shade of buttonwoods on the edge of the Atlantic, they used mahogany seed pods, mangrove propagules, and sea grape leaves to help their brains grasp the idea.
In Florida, this is public education.
The students all use state-supported school choice scholarships to attend Coastal Glades Microschool, a new elementary school founded by former public school teachers Samantha Simpson and Jennifer Lavoie. Both 13-year educators, Simpson and Lavoie wanted a school that reflected their preferred approach to teaching and learning, as well as the goals and values of the families they sought to serve.
The result: Coastal Glades is Montessori-based, immersed in the outdoors, and deeply tied to the local community.
It’s also totally theirs to run as they see fit.
“We’re free. We own it. We don’t have anyone telling us what to do,” Lavoie said. “That’s priceless.”
Florida is leading the country in education freedom, with more than 500,000 students now using choice scholarships. Coastal Glades is another distinctive example of what that freedom looks like.
Microschools are popping up by the hundreds. Former public school teachers are the vanguard in creating them. All the new learning options are stunning, not just in volume but in diversity. In Florida, at least 150 Montessori schools participate in the choice scholarship programs, and at last count, at least 40 “nature schools” serve Florida families, too.
This movement is self-propelled. It’s driven by parents, teachers, and communities who are realizing more every day that public education is in the middle of a sea change. Now, they get to decide what “a good education” looks like.
For the past six years, Simpson and Lavoie worked together at the same school. As choice options exploded around them, freedom kept tapping them on the shoulder.
“We said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just pick up these four walls and move? And it just be us?’” Lavoie said.
To get their bearings, Simpson called a friend, another former public school teacher who founded a microschool. This one happened to be 90 miles north in Broward County, the unofficial microschool capital of America. The friend gave her good advice. She also said starting her own school was “the best thing I’ve ever done.”
Learning at Coastal Glades is proudly “place based.” The colorful communities that populate the islands between the Everglades and the sea are an endless source of exploration and inspiration. Simpson and Lavoie want their students to know and love where they live, so they can grow up to be good citizens and thoughtful stewards.
“Being in the community, being in nature, that’s where you’re going to learn,” Simpson said.
The students learned about bees from a local guy who harvests mangrove honey. They visited a berry farm on the mainland. Even more exotic trips are on tap: To Everglades National Park. To the Keys’ sea turtle hospital. Even to a reef where the students will be able to snorkel near nurse sharks. “We want them to learn that some scary things are not really scary,” Simpson said.
Nearly every day, the students visit natural areas for play-based learning. After the math lesson beneath the buttonwoods, for example, they went hunting for hermit crabs and jellyfish.
“This is just as important as testing, as reading, as anything,” Simpson said. “We want to bring back childhood and the love of learning.”
That’s exactly why Alejandra Reyes enrolled her 5-year-old daughter, Daniella. Daniella’s curiosity is blossoming, Reyes said, because she’s in a small school with more individualized attention and more hands-on learning.
“I didn’t want her to be in class sitting down all day. She’s such a free-spirited little girl,” said Reyes, a stay-at-home mom whose husband is a marine mechanic. “She’s learning so much on her little adventures. It’s, ‘What’s this? What’s that? Let’s look it up.’ “
“We got so lucky that my daughter’s first experience with school is this microschool.”
Simpson and Lavoie like the state of Florida’s academic standards. They use them to guide instruction. But they’re not tethered to pacing guides, and they can switch gears or directions whenever it makes sense. They do that often with their one older student, a fifth grader who was bored in his prior school because he wasn’t being challenged.
At the beach the other day, the older student got to learn about mass, volume, density, and buoyancy while his younger classmates were doing the lesson on place value.
Simpson set out two buckets, one filled with freshwater, one filled with saltwater. The student built a mini boat out of aluminum foil to float on the surface of each, then carefully piled pennies into it to see which boat in which bucket could sustain the most weight. (The one in saltwater won.)
“He loves engineering and problem solving,” Simpson said. And the school has the flexibility to accommodate him with more advanced lessons.
As it becomes even more mainstream, school choice in Florida is experiencing some growing pains. Coastal Glades represents some of those challenges, too.
For classroom space, the school rents a 250-square-foot room in a church. The church meets fire codes for dozens of parishioners, but not for a handful of students. Coastal Glades isn’t the only unconventional learning option to learn about fire codes the hard way – see here, here, and here – but its predicament takes the cake.
In lieu of installing an expensive sprinkler system, which Simpson and Lavoie could not afford, the pair hired a local firefighter, at $37 an hour, to hang out while students were in the building. Since the additional requirements only kick in when there are more than five students, Coastal Glades was able to drop the firefighter as long as it capped enrollment.
Next year, the school will be in another building that shouldn’t have those issues, which means it will be able to serve more families.
Word’s already out on the “coconut telegraph” – that’s Keys-speak for grapevine – that the new school will be growing.
Reyes has no doubt that other parents will respond the same way she did.
“Times have changed. Schools are different,” she said. “What kid doesn’t want to be learning outdoors?”