Alternative education models are on the rise in North Carolina. The number of the state’s private schooled and homeschooled students both reached record highs in the 2024-25 school year according to data from the Division of Non-Public Education, with the exception of the 2020-21 school year that was marked by the pandemic. Somewhere in between the two is a new alternative model, microschools.
Microschools might not boast jaw-dropping statistics so far — but that’s sort of the point.
An estimated 40 microschools were operating across North Carolina as of last year, though educators say more are likely not being included in that count. Microschools tend to serve 22 students on average, though some around the country have grown to as many as 100 students.
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Barnett Berry, a senior research fellow at the Learning Policy Institute and education professor at the University of South Carolina, attributes the beginnings of the microschool movement to the COVID pandemic.
While learning virtually, schools and families found themselves having to get creative with education in the midst of something unprecedented. The pandemic allowed, or even required, parents and educators to think differently, Berry said. But once kids went back to school, much of that excitement dwindled in traditional school settings.
“Some of us were hoping that the pandemic would have served as a catalyst for this, but let me tell you what happened,” Berry said.
“Immediately, the government came back in at the state level, and they were pulling their hair out over what they called academic learning loss, and they started pouring all this money into just trying to catch kids up. Don’t get me wrong, kids need loss of ground, but there was incredible innovation going on.”
The microschool movement, not necessarily traditional schools, capitalized on that pandemic-era innovation.
Microschools are at their best when educators, parents and students co-design the learning experience, Berry said. They are miniature hubs of what schools could be — deeper and more personalized lessons, project-based learning, a focus on what gets students excited and curious.
That idea is what propelled Margo Harper out of her position teaching agriculture at a Lenoir County public school and into opening the SELAH Institute, an agriculture-focused microschool outside of Kinston with just 12 seats to go around once it opens to its first class this fall. She plans to have more teachers for several classes in the future, but the school will always maintain a 12:1 ratio, she said.
Agriculture classes in K-12 often require time spent outside the classroom, whether it be working outdoors or traveling to Future Farmers of America events. Those field trips are essential to getting a well-rounded agriculture education, Harper said, but it can also result in lots of missed assignments and time in core classes.
She found experiential learning to be the most impactful on her students and on her as an educator and imagined a school in which “extracurriculars” like agriculture didn’t take away from core classes but added to them.
SELAH will operate on a hybrid model, so students will spend time at agricultural internships or part-time jobs Monday and Friday doing “work-based learning” and in-person instruction Tuesday through Thursday. At the end of the semester, students will have a portfolio of work they completed and what they learned.
“That could be working on a watermelon farm, volunteering at an animal shelter, anything related to agriculture to get some experience,” she said.
“So for our students, it looks different than homeschool because instead of that Monday and Friday being home work days where they’re largely spending their time continuing to learn about the things that we’re doing in class, they’re going to be spending eight hours each of those days on a work experience. That’s either them logging eight hours of practice on how to weld, or they might be working in their home garden and they eventually want to can strawberries and sell strawberry jam.”
Harper could easily handle more than 12 students if she chose thanks to her public school background, but she finds microschools more conducive to mentoring and simply getting to know her students.
“If 12 was enough for Jesus, 12 is enough for me,” she said.
The hybrid schedule is similar to what homeschool advocates say makes homeschooling beneficial and unique, as many choose a mix of meeting weekly in homeschooling co-op groups, learning individually at home, taking classes at community college and working part-time. So what distinguishes microschools from the myriad of homeschool options?
At Harmony Homeschool Academy in Cary, cofounders Laura Greene, a licensed psychologist with a background in school psychology, and Angela Ruth, a former federal employee turned educator, blend the two by bringing together homeschooled students for in-person instruction up to three days a week.
In-person group learning for homeschooled students isn’t revolutionary, but Ruth said the primary difference between the typical homeschool co-op and their microschool is the background of the instructor. While homeschool co-ops can certainly be academically rigorous in their own right, Ruth said, Harmony employs either certified educators or subject matter experts to teach classes, which are capped at 15 students.
Harmony’s approach as a microschool is that a child’s education be a dual effort between the educators and the parents. Harmony’s classes tend to act as supplemental where parents can’t fully meet their student’s needs.
“Every single material given to the student is actually put in the classroom, and many of the parents take that material and build upon it at home,” Ruth said. “Because we’re hybrid, a lot of the work has to be done at home, and that’s where the parents come in, but we’re giving them the tools and the resources to be able to do that.”
Harmony also places an emphasis on Social Emotional Learning and easing the anxiety many of their students have around school. The smaller class sizes make it easier to offer accommodations for learning disabilities and mental health that traditional private schools often don’t.
That comes in the form of pass/fail homework grades, options to use talk-to-text technology and extensions on assignments when requested by the student. When it comes to accommodations, Harmony recognizes the value in students knowing how to ask for what they need.
“Self advocacy plays a critical role here,” Ruth said.
“We encourage the students to go to the teacher and say, ‘Hey, I have this soccer tournament,’ which is a real world, even adult-related kind of example. ‘Can I please turn in my work a little bit later without penalty?’ And the answer is always ‘Yes, you are advocating for yourself.’ That’s actually an adulting skill that a lot of us don’t take to heart very often.”
The Opportunity Scholarship, or private school vouchers, will be crucial to SELAH’s success and ability for families to afford the $10,000 yearly tuition, Harper said. SELAH was approved as an official private school in February, meaning it can now apply to receive Opportunity Scholarship funds from families.
Because SELAH’s hybrid microschool model will have students working several days a week, Harper also plans to encourage parents to talk with their children about investing in their own education by paying for a portion of their tuition with funds made at their agriculture-focused job.
Harmony, on the other hand, isn’t eligible to receive vouchers because its students are enrolled homeschoolers, but many of its families do pay with funds from Education Savings Accounts.
Critics of vouchers often say private schools shouldn’t receive public funds because they lack oversight and measurements for student success. Harper is tackling that by requiring every SELAH student take the SAT or ACT each year to track their progress.
At Harmony, students receive grades from teachers and encourage parents to honor them, but ultimately it’s up to the parent whether they want to recognize the grade or assign one themselves. Older students tend to dual-enroll at a community college, which of course assigns grades and creates a traditional transcript to send to colleges. Most of Harmony’s students are college-bound, Ruth said.
Frederick Taylor, an 18th-century engineer and the father of scientific management, is often invoked by critics of traditional education who say his ideas on factory work were also used in the design and structure of modern-day “factory model schools,” though there are attempts to debunk the connection.
The constant changing of classes and swapping of teachers Taylor’s model has resulted in today might lead to an efficient education but not a personalized one, Berry said.
“That’s a system not designed for personalization, for every kid to be known, for kids to find passion in their learning as they develop the foundational skills, as well as now the age of AI having them prepared for jobs that haven’t been created yet,” Berry said.
“But with that said everything that I’ve described right there, you can find in public school systems right now. The question is can microschools help us all get there?”
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