With a soon-to-be kindergartener and a husband whose work required periods of family travel, mom Katlyn Taylor of Rogers recognized she had some challenging puzzle pieces and would need to take a nontraditional approach to her oldest daughter’s education.
“When I first started searching, I had no idea the options that were available,” she said. “I started with homeschooling and looked at the co-ops in our area. While looking into that, I came across a couple of different microschools.”
The appeal was immediate.
“Microschools fit our family’s values and goals a little bit better. We wanted a school that would work with us.”
What they found was Olive Grove Nature School, which offers a hybrid part-time microschool, with three days in school and two at home.
“It was a perfect fit for our family because it was close to where we lived, which not a lot of other schools were, including the public schools. And it also gave us the flexibility that we were looking for at that time,” Taylor said.
As the name implies, it also offered extensive outdoor learning. In fact, the majority of Olive Grove’s learning is in nature.
“The appeal, the big appeal of the school was the nature aspect that they would get to learn outside, because we are a very big outdoor family. We live out by the lake,” she said. “Our daughter gets very excited about being outside, and she’s not really one to sit still for very long. So we really liked the idea of a nature school.”
The microschool offered a chance to still be in school. That is, to have school experiences like meeting teachers, having class parties and field trips, and turning classmates into new friends.
“We wanted her to have some time with other kids because that’s very valuable. And we also wanted to be able to have a say in her education.”
Taylor said that, while she could be the full-time educator, she wasn’t entirely confident about it.
“I think the microschool aspect really suited our family, because even with a co-op, we would still be doing the majority of the teaching,” she said. “I love that the microschool has the parents being helpers in the education. At Olive Grove in particular, they do their work on school days, and then tell us what they’re working on during the week so we can supplement that at home with family time and extracurriculars that we choose.”
And parents are also invited to be very involved with the life of the school itself.
“Right off the bat, they let us know that they welcome parents to come and be part of the lessons. They go on field trips that parents can join the kids on. I loved that part of it because, again, one of our goals when we were looking for a microschool was to have more parent involvement than the typical school.”
Of course, at this atypical school, the learning itself is atypical, something Taylor said she often has to explain.
“It’s very positive feedback when I’ve had to explain it, but I have had to explain it to family and friends,” she said. “That gives me a chance to explain what a microschool is and that here she can be outside and learning, and their curriculum is based on that. And everybody I’ve spoken to in that conversation has said, wow, that’s amazing.”
Finding Olive Grove and understanding it took time, but Taylor said it wasn’t impossible, even if it can feel that way as a parent searching for something different in education.
“Traditional school is what a lot of us have done. And when you have young children getting ready to go into school, there’s a lot of other things that you have to think about. And if you’re also thinking about a different kind of school, that just seems overwhelming,” she said. “But it can just be part of your overall process. It doesn’t have to be another thing added to your list: look at an alternative school for your kiddo.”
And for Arkansas families, there’s more support for nontraditional schooling than ever before.
“Originally we were looking at homeschool, because that was pretty accessible for us, pretty low cost,” Taylor said. “But then we found out about the Education Freedom Account funds, and it opened up a lot of possibilities for us, made things more realistic so that we could give our daughter that school experience, but also have the parts of homeschool that we were excited about having. So yes, I think the EFA makes it incredibly accessible for all families across Arkansas.”
The EFA has opened up possibilities for educators to innovate in how learning is delivered and for parents to access those new, innovative environments like Olive Grove, where there is both a more traditional full-time private school enrollment and the part-time hybrid microschool, both based in nature learning.
“When I was a child, this was not what homeschooling looked like,” Taylor laughed.
