Richmond Primary School students participate in an art project outdoors. (Photo courtesy Richmond Primary School)
Across the country, public school enrollment fell drastically in 2020. Enrollments declined nationally by nearly 3%; Virginiaʼs public schools lost 45,000 students, or 3.5%. Excluding Richmond, which saw an enrollment increase on paper because the district then housed a statewide virtual education program, Chesterfield, Henrico and Hanover counties collectively saw a 3.3% decline in enrollment.
Where did those students go? Traditional private schools were an obvious choice for many. But for others, remote learning led to homeschooling co-ops that gradually morphed into microschools. These groups, usually comprising around 15 students from different families, often met in homes, church basements, converted garages or wherever their parents could improvise a classroom.
The breaking point was 18 months of remote learning that satisfied almost no one. Gov. Ralph Northamʼs March 2020 stay-at-home order shut down Virginia schools, which didnʼt fully reopen until fall 2021.
“Zoom school was terrible, awful. I know because I ran a charter school at the time,” says Amanda Simmons-Polanco, a career educator who now owns Vida Academy, a Henrico-based microschool for children ages 4 to 9 that specializes in bilingual education.
Necessity is the mother of invention, so parents and educators fed up with remote learning began to rethink education altogether, building on an undercurrent that had been growing for years. “Around 2005, homeschooling was gaining traction,” says Devon Copeland, the founder and executive director of Iron Village Preparatory Academy, a project-based microschool at the St. Luke Legacy Center in Richmond. “There were different models starting to crop up even then.”
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated that shift dramatically. Statewide, it triggered the largest movement to private education in Virginiaʼs history, according to Weldon Cooper Center data, with the number of homeschoolers — including children with religious exemptions — rising 48%, from 44,226 in fall 2019 to 65,571 in fall 2020.
Spurring those changes was the nascent microschool movement. Parents could now choose a teaching philosophy as deliberately as they chose a school: project-based or self-directed, bilingual immersion or culturally rooted community learning, outdoor exploration or entrepreneurial focused. Beyond simply adding more private school options, there is now an entirely different axis of choice.
Students and instructors at Iron Village Preparatory Academy (Photo courtesy Iron Village Preparatory Academy)
Looking Beyond the Classroom
“So many of these schools started as cohorts, almost like a nanny share,” says Allison Lu, owner of consulting business The Schoolhouse Scout. “Many of the stay-at-home parents were former educators who took on helping the kids. When students could return to in-person learning, many opted to continue with the cohort style. It was out of necessity. ... Now a lot of them are popping up, catering to studentsʼ personality and learning styles.”
The choices are so numerous, in fact, that Lu launched The Schoolhouse Scout to help parents navigate the growing field of options, from traditional private schools to nontraditional microschools. Through in-person interviews with parents and their children, she matches families to schools based on priorities such as finances, location and environment, then assesses where the child is likely to thrive.
Lu knows the search firsthand. After a career in recruiting, career coaching and talent scouting in New York, she moved her family back to Richmond to be closer to home. “We found ourselves in a pickle,” she says. “We werenʼt huge fans of the public school we were zoned for, but the private schools were so competitive — and that was just for pre-K or kindergarten. I felt like I was applying for college or a job. It shouldnʼt feel that way. We learned a lot throughout the process.”
Lindsy Wiltshire, a Henrico County Public Schools educator, found herself in a similar bind. In 2020, she was invited to join one of three teaching pods, an effort to put a teacher behind the computer screen rather than a working parent. The group soon found that small, in-person gatherings worked better than remote instruction: six kids per pod, spanning kindergarten through second grade, meeting in a home. By November, those families had pulled their children from public school entirely, homeschooling them for the rest of the year.
“This really opened our eyes to what homeschool, or a more relaxed style, could look like, and how much growth we were seeing with small-group instruction,” Wiltshire says. “Public schools are very large systems. No matter the teacher or principal, theyʼre under a system thatʼs difficult to change. Going through the pandemic as an educator, the pressure and expectations were unrealistic — teachers were put at great risk, and there were so many restrictions, they couldnʼt truly teach.”
Finding a New Way
As a result, many public school educators left their careers altogether or found different teaching outlets. Wiltshire was one of them: In 2021 she founded Richmond Primary School, a Christian-based private school at St. Matthews Episcopal Church on Monument Avenue that began as a microschool. It now employs 15 teachers and has grown to nearly 60 students, from preschool through sixth grade.
The shift reflects a national trend, not just a local one, says Tom Shields, professor of education and leadership studies at the University of Richmond. “In some ways, microschools are an outgrowth of the school-choice movement, or the school-reform movement, to challenge what might be the traditional neighborhood school,” Shields says. “They provide choice, and choice is not a bad thing at all if itʼs done with some civil rights protections for children. When itʼs done to neighborhoods as a way of undermining the neighborhood school, thatʼs not necessarily a good thing.”
That inclination for choice found new momentum during the pandemic. “The microschool movement, which usually has from eight to 15 students, has been happening across the United States, not just in the Richmond area,” Shields says. “Itʼs an outgrowth of the COVID pandemic, where people would create a pod in their neighborhood — in a house, a business or a neighborhood center.”
These pods have since organized in different ways: as learning centers helping families meet their stateʼs homeschooling requirements, as unaccredited private schools, and even as microschooling programs within traditional, district-run public schools. Some operate independently; others align with provider networks or operate as formal partnerships.
Microschools, however, are largely unregulated in Virginia. The state doesnʼt technically oversee traditional private schools or homeschoolers, but private schools can attain accreditation through the Virginia Council for Private Education.
And while many microschools remain home-based, just as many have found space in office buildings, houses of worship or nonprofit locations.
Matt Dreier, Pace Academy co-founder and executive director (Photo courtesy Pace Academy)
For Matt Dreier, the pandemic was “a once-in-a-generational opportunity for public schools, or traditional schools, for that matter, to make the changes that were in line with what everybody was saying. Kids need more responsibility. They need more recess. They need more outdoor time,” he explains. “I didnʼt see any districts really leading the charge on this.”
Dreier got his doctorate in educational leadership after a 22-year career in the Marines. He decided that “if I wanted to see the change in the world, I had to be the change in the world. Turns out my passions lie in reinventing the education space.”
In 2023, he and Kristen Braia, founder of Young Chefs Academy of Richmond, created Pace Academy in North Chesterfield. With a student body of 60 and plans to enroll up to 200 in the next couple of years, Pace can no longer be considered a microschool, but the microschool philosophy still informs its approach.
Pace Academy, described as a self-directed learning center, is "pretty unique," says Dreier, “and unapologetically so. We believe that children are far more capable than we adults give them credit for most of the time, so we created a learning environment that we think places the onus on the child to succeed. The adults are there to support the child on their particular education journey.”
In this new wave of microschools and emerging private schools, the focus is on school choice, with the childʼs personality and learning style becoming key factors for educators as well as families.
“Iʼm a teacher by training, and I later became a principal in the charter system in New York City,” says Simmons-Polanco of Vida Academy, who moved back to Virginia to be near family during the pandemic. “That experience opened my eyes to parts of the system I didnʼt like and how it functioned. Across education, people are recognizing the intense pressure of standardized testing, the lack of flexibility for children and the extent of teacher burnout. Iʼve seen children who loved school in kindergarten reach the upper grades and decide it isnʼt fun anymore.”
Students gather for storytime at Pace Academy. (Courtesy Pace Academy)
For other educators, like Copeland of Iron Village Prep, it is about community. “We want to be about academic empowerment, we want to be about cultural celebration and we want to be about community engagement,” she says. “Everything we do we try to infuse with Richmond spirit. We try to think about what kind of leaders will Richmond need in the future.”
Finding the right school is a project parents should start earlier than they think, Lu advises. Many microschools and private schools have waitlists, and the earlier a child is enrolled — ideally by prekindergarten — the smoother the path through the grades that follow.
“Itʼs good to start looking early, even if youʼre not sure what you want to do,” she says. “Your child is 2 years old and kindergarten is several years away, so you think, ʻWe donʼt have to think about that yet.’ But the longer you wait, the more challenging it becomes.”
That complexity, though, is also the point. A few years ago, most Richmond-area families had three primary options: public school, private school or homeschool. Now they have something harder to navigate, but many more options — schools built around language, culture, student agency, outdoor learning or community. Schools started by educators who left a system they believed in but couldnʼt fix from within.
For some, the solution is to build something new, because, as Copeland notes, “One size does not fit all when educating kids.”
