With Koch money, ASU charter network helping to expand microschools

Arizona State University’s charter school network is working to expand its footprint and help launch microschools across the country.

It started to do so this past school year with a fellowship program for microschool founders, funded with a grant from the Stand Together Trust, part of a philanthropic network founded by billionaire Charles Koch.

The fellowship, which supported microschool founders with elements like recruiting staff, selecting curriculum and financing, was launched as a response to growing market demand, said Amy McGrath, ASU’s vice president of educational outreach and the managing director of ASU Preparatory Academy, the public university’s charter school network.

McGrath said she thinks there’s a growing demand from parents for more flexible and personalized educational options. “We were being responsive to that,” she said.

Microschools are small and typically private educational settings.

ASU Prep itself operates four microschools for students enrolled in its online charter school, ASU Prep Digital. In addition to learning online, those students attend school in person for a minimum of two days per week in a small cohort of no more than 25 students. McGrath said those models, which focus heavily on project-based and career-oriented learning and position the teaching role as more of a “guide” or “coach,” have seen success when it comes to students’ academic outcomes.

In the microschool model, teachers, or “guides,” are “not standing in front of a classroom delivering a lesson,” McGrath said. “They’re more the underpinning support to empower the students,” who have goals they must reach on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis.

The yearlong fellowship was, in part, an opportunity to share what ASU Prep has learned through its microschools and “power its growth outside of Arizona.”

The fellowship received 88 applications from 29 states, with 26 microschool founders ultimately participating, including three in Arizona. Applicants had to have a vision for their school before joining. “We didn’t want to design their microschool,” McGrath said. “We just wanted to support its implementation.”

Fellowship participants also had the option to purchase and use ASU Prep Digital curriculum for their microschools, which many chose to do, McGrath said.

Amanda Comage-Trower, one of the fellowship participants, launched a microschool last year out of the Mental Heart Healing House in Queen Creek, which she founded four years ago as a healing space for children based around therapeutic play.

This past year, the microschool had 12 students and two teachers who were hired from the Apache Junction Unified School District.

Comage-Trower has also secured a new location for the in-person microschool at a horse boarding farm in Gilbert. The on-site microschool will serve up to 30 students in first through sixth grades and will focus on students with emotional needs like anxiety and feelings of displacement, she said. It will integrate art therapy, music therapy and equine therapy into the school day.

She’s still interviewing teachers and developing a curriculum for the school — she said it will focus on project-based and hands-on learning — but said there are dozens of children on the waitlist from last year already. The school can’t meet the needs of every student, though. It doesn’t accept highly aggressive children or autistic children with significant intellectual or developmental disabilities, “just because our environment isn’t set up for that,” she said.

Tuition is $10,000 per year, which families can use Arizona education voucher funds to help pay for, she said.