Meg Pileggi spent six years as a Marine Corps officer before she founded Collective Leadership Academy, a hybrid microschool for homeschool families in Kinston, North Carolina. In this conversation she describes a program built around relationship first. Monday learning days happen out in the community: at the barn, on Meals on Wheels routes, on family field trips. Older students teach younger ones. A student-run foster closet supplies local families in need. And a lot of the growth she pays attention to shows up on the playground, in how kids treat each other, not on any test.

We talk about the kitchen-table moment that reshaped how she thinks about homework, why she cares more about how a child treats their neighbor than how they score, and what it looks like to keep families together instead of sending kids away for thirty-five hours a week. Part of What We See, a conversation series on what learning actually looks like across indie education: microschools, homeschool families, and hybrid programs, in their own words.

Lacy Manship co-founded ALC Mosaic, a self-directed school in Charlotte, North Carolina, and has been a key leader in the early childhood program there for 13 years. Today she holds the space for reading and writing across the school: a Reader's Workshop where kids from five to teenager choose to come in and work on literacy while kids climb trees and dig in the sandbox right outside the door. In this conversation: what a ten-year-old gains by waiting to learn to read, why identity is the hardest thing to teach back, and what gets lost when writing becomes a rubric score. Fair warning: if you've only encountered literacy on the prescriptive timelines of conventional schooling, some of this conversation may challenge you. Lacy has spent decades watching kids come to reading on their own terms, and she describes what that actually looks like. What We See is a conversation series across Indie Education. What learning looks like, in their own words.

What We See is a conversation series across Indie Education. Microschools, homeschool families, and hybrid programs talking about what they're actually doing, how they know it's working, and what the metrics miss.

Justine Wilson spent seventeen years in conventional schools, teaching and then leading buildings across Ohio, Colorado, Egypt, Brazil, and Qatar, before founding Curious & Kind Education in Sarasota, Florida. Now in its third year, Curious & Kind is a forest school that homeschool families choose one to three days a week, on a campus with a creek, a mud kitchen, and a well-loved rope swing.

Justine walks through a typical morning, from the stump circle where the whole group co-plans the day to the offerings kids drift between, and she describes what she watches kids build in themselves that a report card was never designed to hold.

One of the lightest moments is about a hamburger, and why one student swore it was the best cookout she had ever been to.

What We See is a conversation series across Indie Education. Microschools, homeschool families, and hybrid programs talking about what they're actually doing, how they know it's working, and what the metrics miss.

In this episode, Tomis talks with Jill Haskins, founder of Kainos Microschool in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Jill is a former public school teacher who said she'd never homeschool, then did; said she'd never pursue accreditation, then joined the first Middle States pilot for microschools. Kainos started as 11 kids in her living room in January 2025 and grew to 25 students, a staff of four, and a waitlist of 28 by that fall, operating out of a former vape shop in a strip mall.

She describes quiet, focused mornings driven by planner checklists her students love; why her team whites out the grade levels on assessment reports before kids ever see them; the "side quests" her students named themselves; and what changed for a seventh grader whose previous school had decided to stop teaching him to read.

Sheri Grace has a PhD in early childhood education and spent years teaching teachers before she went looking for the thing her textbooks had left out. She found forest school, got a little mad nobody had told her about it sooner, and started Piedmont Forest School in a Winston-Salem park where, as she tells it, no one had ever actually played.

Five years on it runs five days a week, and this fall they are adding an Agile Learning Center to continue serving kids that grow up in their program. She walks through what a morning in the woods actually looks like, why a kid with a saw is steadier than you'd expect, and what four kids learned building a fort that nobody assigned.

In this episode I talk with Denise Lever, a former wildland firefighter who started homeschooling while her family moved nine times in thirteen years, and who now runs a network of eleven microschools in an Arizona town of six thousand people.

We get into her three-tier model of autonomous founders sharing one building, the GPS meetings where guide, parent, and student sit down together to design a learning plan, and her four conditions for how kids actually develop: relationships, autonomy, respect, and competencies. Denise also tells the story of her daughter's senior year on an off-grid ranch in Mexico, which led to an archeology interest, a state college scholarship, and a useful argument about the difference between being educated and being schooled.

Chelsey Harrington co-founded Evergreen Academy, a nature-based microschool in Conway, Arkansas. In this conversation she describes what learning looks like there.

Two crawfish in a creek become a two-week investigation that quietly moves through biology, habitat, and seasonality, with the younger kids out hunting for crawfish chimneys and the whole group ending up sculpting clay models; one catalyst, and the learning spreads across science, observation, and art without anyone naming a subject.

A jump-rope craze that starts with one girl and a piece of string becomes a study in how kids learn from each other: they practice at home unprompted, they cheer the kid who gets one jump as loudly as the kid who gets forty, and eventually they take over turning the rope themselves, no longer needing an adult to hold the other end.

None of it was assigned, and none of it would fit on a report card. There's no test for whether a child cheers for the kid who got one jump, no rubric for two weeks spent on crawfish. Chelsey's case is that you can't compel this kind of learning with the perfect curriculum; you build the relationships, you invite it, and you wait.

In Episode 02, I sit down with Iman Cassells Alleyne, founder of Kind Academy in South Florida and creator of Launch Your Kind, a program that has helped 90+ microschools get off the ground. Iman's K–10 program spends the first two weeks of every school year without touching academics, and parents are stressed. By the end of the year, her neurodiverse learners have grown over a full "grade level" on 30 minutes a day of focused academic work.

We talk about what's actually happening in those first two weeks, why staging Hamilton with nine-year-olds teaches more history than a textbook, and what it took for the data to finally catch up with what she's been saying for a decade.