School options ‘born from necessity’

“We’re praying to outgrow this space,” said Stephanie Reinertsen, a former public high school English teacher who opened Echo Lake Academy in West Milford last year.

In its second year of existence, the K-12 Christian school has grown from 25 students last year to 36 this year, including Reinertsen’s 8- and 10-year-old children. “I would love to be a school of like a thousand kids,” she said.

Fewer students are walking the halls of public schools again this year, the continuation of a nationwide shift quietly reshaping the behemoth institution that is the public school system. The main driver of disenrollment is historically low birth rates – the nation saw an all-time low of 1.6 births per woman in 2024.

But growing momentum toward homeschooling, private schools and a new generation of “microschools” is also playing a part.

“There is no question that something is shifting,” said Erica Hertzberg, who co-founded the microschool Spartan Academy last year after seeing her son lose his excitement for learning. “More and more families are searching for education that feels personal, meaningful and connected to the real world.”

Echo Lake, which operates out of a church, started in 2024; and a mile and a half down the road, microschool Roots & Wings just moved into its new location, a park building rented from the town.

Milford, Pa., is home to Ascend Academy, which opened in 2020 and occupies an eight-acre campus it shares with a church and another Montessori school.

In Newburgh, N.Y., Catholic schools San Miguel Academy for boys and Nora Cronin Presentation Academy for girls opened their doors in 2006, with a mission of breaking the cycle of poverty.

Dissatisfaction with public schools

Reinertsen, a devout Christian who wanted her family’s faith reflected in her kids’ education, had long pondered opening a school. She was spurred to action during Covid, the year she spent both teaching remotely and watching her five-year-old start kindergarten on Zoom.

“The closest Christian schools were each 30 miles in either direction, and I realized that there was a real need for a Christ-centered school right in West Milford. So between that, my professional experience and my personal convictions, I was like, I’m going to open a school.”

Her discouragement went beyond that hard year, though. After 16 years teaching she’d been growing increasingly disheartened with the public education system’s focus on data and graduation rates over student learning.

“I think we kind of push students through the system in order to get state funding. And that just trickles down and discourages your staff and your teachers,” said Reinertsen, who taught English at Garfield High School.

Sometimes, she said, she’d have a student who failed her ninth grade English class show up on the roster for her tenth grade class, “and it weighed heavily on me as a teacher.”

Of the 36 students attending Echo Lake this September, 10 come from public school and the rest, from homeschool backgrounds. All attend church regularly, a requisite of acceptance to the school.

Unlike in public school, Echo Lake’s curriculum is individualized, with students working at their own pace, doing work determined by proficiency rather than grade level. “Students cannot move on to the next unit until they’ve mastered the current one with at least a score of 80 percent,” Reinertsen said. ”This just ensures that they don’t get lost in the crowd.”

Third through tenth graders are in one classroom, and kindergarten through second graders in another. The school gives standardized tests and follows a structured curriculum, so it’s considered a private school rather than a microschool, Reinertsen said. Tuition is $7,500 for full-time and $6,000 for a hybrid option of three days a week.

“I do see a lot of parents interested in moving their children away from public education for various reasons,” she said. “I was a public school teacher, so I appreciate public education, but I think it’s great to see more options in the community, that parents have the opportunity to choose the best educational path for their children. I don’t think of learning as a one size fits all.”

Reinertsen is aware that the loss of students to private schools will probably hurt public schools in the long run. “I do think lower enrollment does affect the public education school system, definitely in terms of funding.”

The rise of microschools

West Milford’s newest school, Roots & Wings Academy, opened its doors Sept. 4. After a pilot year serving nine kids, this microschool is (in step with the nationwide trend) growing less micro. This year the school has 31 students, including seven part-timers who are homeschooled the rest of the time; and 10 employees, including part-time “specials” teachers in Spanish, art and acting.

Four- through seven-year- old “seedlings” are in one classroom and 8- to 11-year-old “explorers” are in the other, with three teachers between them. About a third of the students, including the Mills’ two kids, came from public school.

Microschools – deliberately small, usually mixed-age schools being created outside of existing education systems and government accountability – now serve an estimated 2 percent of the U.S. student population, or about 750,000 students.

The modern microschool movement began in the early 2000s, but it was the pandemic, with its school closures, remote learning and homeschooling pods, that fueled its explosive growth.

“Some people started during Covid and they just didn’t stop, right?” said Roots & Wings Founder Jenny Mills, of the homeschooling explosion. “They realized there was this whole other way of learning, flexibility for their families. But some of our students who have come to us, their parents started homeschooling during Covid and now they’ve reached a critical age where they’re ready for them to be socializing with other kids.”

Like most microschool founders, Mills is an educator, having worked as a teacher, teacher trainer and mindfulness consultant for 20 years. Her most recent book, Students Can’t Pay Attention and Other Lies I Believed: 16 Lessons to Build Foundational Skills and Reclaim Your Classroom (2023), addresses the ratcheting stress on teachers who returned to in-person learning to find themselves facing culture wars, school shootings, learning loss, low pay and an overemphasis on standardized tests.

Jenny and her husband, Burton Mills, a consultant in the elevator industry, didn’t set out to open a school. It was only when their kids, elementary schoolers in the Ringwood Lake Public School system, started struggling and they couldn’t find an alternative that the idea took shape. “It was born from necessity – what we wanted for our kids but it didn’t exist,” said Burton.

They saw their daughter internalizing her struggle in math until they worried it was becoming self-destructive.

“I’m not good at this” turned into “I’m not smart, I hate school,” and after they got her a tutor, “there’s something wrong with me,” recalled Jenny.

Meanwhile their younger son was having trouble sitting at a desk and getting in trouble for acting out, coming home with his work covered in drawings. He was bored, his parents thought.

They looked at a private school, but at $35,000 a year per student, “that would put a whole ’nother strain on the family,” said Burton.

They looked at homeschooling, but Jenny had her own career ambitions, plus they wanted their kids to be with other kids. They thought about starting a homeschool pod with another family or two, but the teacher would need to make real money, they’d need insurance and a location – all of which required scale.

“It quickly kind of just snowballed to where we are,” said Burton.

Between the two of them, the couple had the expertise needed to start a school: Burton had the business knowledge and Jenny was an educator. “This is an extremely tall order and scary, but we can figure it out,” Burton recalled thinking.

Roots & Wings has attracted parents who are concerned with aspects of public school, said Jenny, like “top-down instruction,” the amount of seat time and lack of outdoor time. “You get 14 minutes to eat and 14 minutes outside,” she said.

Students at Roots & Wings spend about half their day outside.

Full-time tuition at Roots & Wings is $10,290; a two-day per week option is $4,750. Tuition includes a daily healthy snack - organic corn chips and guacamole or bananas and a choice of nut butters.

The school received a $10,000 grant from the Vela Institute, a nonprofit funded in part by libertarian billionaire Charles Koch, to buy furniture like desks on wheels and height-adjustable tables that allow for flexibility.

Talula and Zach joined their parents outside at a picnic table in the middle of a school day to talk to this reporter. “Now I actually like school,” said Talula, 10. “I can have fun. I’m not getting graded and having tests. I was really looking forward to the first day of school.”

“It’s just way better,” said Zach, 8. “Way more outside.”

The boom in microschools does not necessarily have to come at a cost to the public school system, Jenny believes.

Some states like Indiana are exploring a model where charter microschools exist under an umbrella alongside public schools, allowing the schools to share administrative services and families to choose which school fits their kids best, she pointed out. And because they are not beholden to state standards, said Jenny, microschools can act as a sort of lab, testing educational best practices – like mixed-age cohorts and smaller teacher to student ratios – that could eventually make their way back to public schools.

Training ‘learners’ how to think

Perhaps the largest microschool in the region is Ascend Academy in Milford, Pa., which started out in 2020 as a homeschool co-op serving 12 five-to-eight-year-olds out of an 800-square-foot space in a strip mall in Shohola. Now Ascend serves about 50 “learners” from its eight-acre campus, which was formerly a day camp.

Founder Alyssa Verdi had been a public school health teacher in Manhattan and Yonkers, but left the field burnt out and knowing she would never return.

Then, when her eldest child was four, she encountered a Montessori school and was re-inspired.

“Once I saw that, honestly, the Lord just put it on my heart, I think. It was a calling that He placed on my heart.”

She Googled, “How do I open a small Christian Montessori school?” and quickly hooked up with a Texas-based microschool network called Acton Academy. (This year the school switched to the spinoff Apogee Strong network, which has a stronger focus on holistic health, said Verdi). She opened her door within the year – which happened to be in the middle of the pandemic.

“I had to unlearn everything,” said Verdi. “I had to unlearn what I knew about education, to not ‘teach,’” she said, but rather, “to set up an environment where they could learn on their own, give them challenges that I thought they couldn’t do.”

She showed the kids a picture of an abacus, for instance, when studying Ancient Greece, and the kids worked together to build one on their own.

“Teachers give answers. Guides are supposed to train them how to think, find answers on their own with the resources they have,” she said. “I loved it more than I loved teaching.”

The next year, she and her husband, Rob Verdi, took the school nonprofit and were able to buy the campus. “I was kind of like a deer in headlights. We basically grew five-fold in year two,” said Verdi.

Now Ascend employs a staff of 10 and serves “learners” ages four through fourteen but with plans to go through all the way through high school.

Verdi chooses her words carefully: “academy” instead of “school,” “studio” for “classroom,” “guide” for “teacher,” “learner” for student, “passion project” and “Socratic discussion” instead of homework and lessons, to differentiate themselves from traditional school.

As for the families drawn to Ascend, “I think parents are kind of just wanting more autonomy,” she said. “I think that’s a lot of what it is the parents are starting to see, maybe, that I do have a choice. Of course, you have to be able to afford it.”

Full-time tuition at Ascend ranges from $8,690 to $9,240.

“And school choice would be amazing,” she said, referring to a growing movement nationwide – now a reality in every red state – to offer taxpayer-funded vouchers to families to spend at the school of their choice.

The reshaping of public schools

The exodus of students, and the state funding that comes with them, poses a significant threat to the public school system.

Take West Milford, N.J., whose school district has shed 1,600 students since 2002-3 and is grappling with a $9 million cut in state funding since the 2017-2018 school year. The district closed Westbrook Elementary two years ago, repurposing the building for an existing special education academy.

“We’re trying to scrape together every penny just to maintain our current level of programming,” said West Milford Superintendent Dr. Brian Kitchin at a March school board meeting.

Public school enrollment in Orange County, N.Y., has declined 14 percent since 2010, from 64,285 to 55,039 students. The county shuttered nine school buildings between 2004 and 2015, including Chester High School (2004) and two of Warwick’s four elementary schools: Kings Elementary (2013) and Pine Island Elementary (2011).

“We saw this massive number of school buildings closing – elementary schools by and large,” said Adam Bosch, president of Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress, a nonprofit research organization that released a report on school closures last summer. “These are really at the heart of communities, not only physically, but also the first place people maybe voted, obviously the first place they went to school. Elementary schools are just so ingrained in public life in a lot of ways.”

Sussex County, N.J., has lost 26 percent of its public school students since 2006, its collective student body shrinking from 26,571 to 19,558 students.

“Yes, we have experienced that trend here,” said Delaware Valley School District Superintendent Brian Blaum, in Pike County, Pa., whose student body has contracted 26 percent since 2006, from 5,700 to 4,214 this school year. “As numbers declined, we’ve eliminated positions through attrition.”

The district has shed 44 classroom teachers since 2013, according to data from the district and the National Center for Education Statistics. “Looking at projected enrollments K-12, we believe that we’ve essentially leveled out at this point without major fluctuations coming.”

“The more the population shrinks, the more you have to talk initially about closing buildings,” added Bosch from Patterns for Progress. “We just saw in the region the first school district merger – with Roscoe and Livingston Manor,” a pair of small Sullivan County districts that merged into the Rockland Central School District in July. “And I would imagine, to the extent that they can figure out transportation distances and travel times and things like that, that we’re going to see more folks start to talk as the years go by about the potential need or desire for mergers to build in efficiencies.”

With fewer kids going to school in the district, passing a school budget will likely get tougher, predicts Bosch, partly because in half-full buildings, per-student spending tends to balloon, and partly because fewer voters will be motivated to show up and vote yes to the school budget.

The Tuxedo School District, whose student body has plummeted from 549 in 2000 to 192 last year, is seeing this dynamic play out. Tuxedo spent $69,818 per pupil last year – more than double the New York State average and second only to Kiryas Joel, which spent $215,111 per student for its 176 pupils. Voters rejected Tuxedo’s proposed school district budget for the second and final time by 17 votes in June – making the district one of three statewide to suffer that fate and forcing it to adopt a contingency budget.

“The fewer kids you have in the district, the fewer voters you have with a direct connection to the public schools: their kids or their grandkids, right?,” said Bosch. “Discussions about mergers or consolidations or shared services have to become more real.”