By Kerry McDonald

In January, Utah became the second state this year, after Iowa, to enact a universal school choice policy. Several more states soon followed in passing expansive school choice legislation, including Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, South Carolina, and Oklahoma, joining earlier school choice leaders, Arizona and West Virginia. This legislation is an important step in expanding education options for families, but its ultimate success depends on ensuring that the supply of available education options meets parent demand for these options.

To that end, Utah’s Libertas Institute has been building relationships with local education entrepreneurs, and aspiring entrepreneurs, over the past 10 months while supporting efforts to expand the supply of available learning options throughout Utah. 

What began with a Libertas-SPN entrepreneur workshop in August 2022 with more than 20 education entrepreneurs from across Utah has grown into the Utah Microschool Association, a project of the Libertas Institute. The association targets founders of microschools, or low-cost private schools that often take a more individualized approach to learning than conventional schools. It will convene its first in-person, half-day workshop this month with approximately 30 school founders and prospective founders. 

Led by Libertas Institute education policy analyst, Jon England, a former Utah public school teacher and administrator, the association has three primary goals: advocacy, training, and networking. It will help to identify various entrepreneurial and regulatory hurdles and advocate solutions, such as supporting bills that address zoning and occupancy regulations that are often onerous and unnecessary for many small or unconventional schools. Recognizing that many, if not most, of today’s school founders are former school teachers without much general business experience or knowledge, the association will also provide training in topics related to organizational development, marketing, finance and accounting, staffing, and so on. Finally, the association will facilitate networking among its member entrepreneurs, helping them to connect with each other, share resources, and build a grassroots community of support. 

“Our goal is to see the activation of at least 10 more microschools within the upcoming academic year,” said England, noting that he has seen rising interest from new founders since the state’s universal education savings account (ESA) legislation passed earlier this year. He explains that supporting these founders can help to ensure the successful implementation of the ESA program, which goes into effect in the 2024/2025 academic year and provides each Utah student with about $8,000 to use on a wide variety of approved education expenses, including tuition at microschools. 

England sees widespread benefits of the new ESA program for parents and learners who will have more choices, but he also sees benefits for teachers who are feeling stifled in conventional schools. “As a teacher, I look at what a microschool can do for a teacher who’s frustrated by the system,” said England. “I look at the chance it gives them to get out from under the bureaucracy that frustrates a lot of teachers and start their own thing. I see them being able to teach the way that they always dreamed about when they were in college and that was the reason they went into education—which was to help individual students learn and grow. That’s why people become teachers.”

England thinks that it’s crucial for more SPN state partners to focus on the supply side of school choice policies, along with the demand side. “We work really hard on providing parental choice,” said England of SPN partners advocating education choice policies. “But if parents don’t have something to select, then do they really have parental choice? There has to be something for people to go to when they leave the public system. Just hoping for that to happen doesn’t help.” 

Recent legislative victories are a huge win for families and learners who will be able to exercise education choice, but the sustained success of these victories will depend on catalyzing the supply of education options so that parents actually have choices to make.

Kerry McDonald is the Velinda Jonson Family Education Fellow at SPN and host of the LiberatED podcast.