Kerry McDonald is the Velinda Jonson Family Education Fellow at State Policy Network

Education entrepreneurship is flourishing across the U.S., as entrepreneurial parents and teachers create alternatives to conventional district schools. One of the most vibrant clusters of this entrepreneurship is in South Florida, where the grassroots non-profit organization, Innovative Educators Network (InED), includes more than 125 microschools and related learning models, serving more than 8,000 students annually.

InEd was co-founded in 2021 by Shiren Rattigan, a former teacher in the Chicago Public Schools who opened the microschool, Colossal Academy, in Fort Lauderdale, and Toni Frallicciardi, founder of Surf Skate Science, a weekly homeschool program that blends STEM subjects with action sports. The pair noticed the growing demand for innovative, out-of-system learning models, as well as the desire by more parents and teachers to build these models. They created InEd to provide support, community, and resources for these Florida founders.

Last month, InEd welcomed State Policy Network and SPN’s Florida partner, The James Madison Institute (JMI), to their monthly gathering to lead a Saturday workshop on the challenges and regulatory barriers these entrepreneurs are confronting. Implementation and reimbursement headaches related to Florida’s expanded school choice programs, including its new universal education savings account (ESA) program, were among the founders’ top concerns, but there were others as well. For instance, zoning and occupancy codes designed for traditional schooling models are often mismatched for microschools and can make it difficult for founders to start or scale their small businesses.

Despite these challenges, more everyday entrepreneurs are creating the new, individualized, low-cost, high-quality private educational models that parents want. One South Florida founder, Felicia Rattray, launched her low-cost microschool, Permission To Succeed Academy, in Fort Lauderdale in 2020, serving mostly low-income students. By June 2023, Rattray, who was a public school teacher in Florida for more than a decade, grew her microschool to 25 mixed-age students. Once Florida’s new universal ESA program went into effect on July 1, Rattray’s program tripled to more than 60 students, including many children who were previously enrolled in a local district school.

“When people come to our school, they tell me that what they love the most is that their child will have individualized teaching,” Rattray told me in a recent podcast interview. “They tell me that they like the fact that we aren’t just going to put them in a fifth grade class and give them fifth grade level work. No, we’re going to put you in your fifth grade class, but identify what your true skills are. So if you’re in the fifth grade, but you’re on a second grade level, you’re going to get second grade work and we’re going to meet you where you are and build you up so that you could do that fifth grade work with confidence, with fidelity, with a high self-esteem, knowing I can really do this.”

Florida’s is now the largest school choice initiative in the U.S., with every K-12 student in the Sunshine State eligible for approximately $8,000 a year in education funding to use toward a variety of education expenses, including at private schools, microschools, and similar learning spaces. While the supply of these schools and schooling alternatives is multiplying, thanks to the bottom-up efforts of community groups like InEd, there is still a wide supply-demand gap.

Data shared last month from the education site reimaginED found a gap of nearly 100,000 Florida students who had been awarded scholarship funds but did not use them. While it’s difficult to know with certainty why these families didn’t use the funds they sought, it’s likely that some of them couldn’t find a school or learning model that fit their needs and preferences, or the ones they could find had long waiting lists. Encouraging more entrepreneurial educators to build low-cost schools and similar educational spaces—and making it easier for them to do so by lessening regulatory roadblocks—will help more families to find just the right educational fit for their children.

Network partners can play an important role in narrowing the supply-demand gap as education choice spreads. “JMI hopes to help foster the spread of micro-education enterprises—and of networks like InEd—so that Florida can close the 96,000 gap between families that applied for and were awarded scholarships and those that actually chose to use them,” said William Mattox, director of the Marshall Center for Educational Options at JMI.

Building relationships with local education entrepreneurs, listening to their concerns, and supporting efforts to remove business barriers, can make a big impact in activating more education options for families. And for anyone interested in learning more about the dynamic educational ecosystem in South Florida, check out InEd’s January 2024 conference.