A temporary solution to school closures has found new life as an ideological safe space. whatpaula reports
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Isla was in kindergarten in Voorhees, New Jersey when the pandemic hit. Before long, remote learning flattened school into a glitchy abstraction, and she became restless, fidgety, withdrawn. Like millions of other kids, she soon fell behind. “It was a nightmare,” her mother, Lindsay, recalls. “Besides just the fact that it was hard to stay on track and listen, it caused problems with vision and headaches.
It turned out to be a good option. Being unmasked “helped her anxiety tremendously,” Lindsay says. The particular micro-school that Isla joined veered away from Common Core, the set of standards that regularly assesses kids’ progress, and turned to a flexible, à la carte curriculum that worked off students’ innate skills. Rather than be restricted to a desk, children were free to roam around and take a break if they needed to.
With the school year coming to a close, alternative education is just the most recent development in the building crescendo of curricular frustration among conservative parents. Usually comprised of elementary- or middle-school-age children, pods and micro-schools are made up of anywhere from a few to more than 20 students and one or two teachers. Micro-schools are typically larger and run out of a rented space as opposed to a home.
Not long after we first spoke, Stouffer sent me photos of a micro-school called Independence Day Academy in Mount Laurel. The space is tucked inside a corporate center, totaling five rooms. Despite its stark backdrop, the rooms resemble plushy playrooms more than classrooms, their white walls adorned with decals of willowy cartoon trees. The floor in another room is mostly covered by a furry white rug, and a small play area features a lime-green ball pit and pop-up tunnel.
There is no precise data on how many children attend pods or micro-schools in New Jersey, but they are a slice of the 18,000 kids who have left public schools since the start of the pandemic. And even beyond New Jersey, the pandemic prompted nationwide interest in alternative education.
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