Two families who went looking for a different kind of school
Every parent who has pulled a kid out of school knows the moment. Not the tour or the paperwork. The moment they looked at their child and saw somebody who had stopped looking forward to the day.
What comes after is harder. The right school may not exist in your town, or costs more than you have. You may be the only family on your street who leaves.
LaReita and her husband have had six children in public schools for twenty years. By the time their youngest hit fifth grade, the mismatch was obvious. He was far ahead in reading and far behind in math, in a class of twenty-five. That gap was not going to close, and he was bored everywhere else. She wrote that “boredom and frustration is not what we wanted our son to associate with learning and education.” They pulled him out in 2024, spent a year detoxing from public school expectations, and joined a microschool where he thrives.
Ayme started looking in 2019, when her son was in first grade. She wanted homeschooling, her husband did not, and she needed to keep working. The model she loved did not exist in her town, so she considered opening one herself. Then a family arrived intent on starting it, and she registered the day it opened.
He is thirteen now and loves school. He wakes up on his own, packs his own lunch, and is always early. When his class planned a Valentine’s exchange, he decided to bake cookies for everybody, asked his dad to help, and carried them out the door. Nobody reminded him. “Responsibility was not innate to his personality,” Ayme wrote. When finances shifted and tuition was at risk, a scholarship kept him there.
Neither family set out to make a statement. They wanted a fit for one kid, and had to find it themselves.
Stories like theirs are why we built the Libertas Action Coalition. We did not want to keep working one state at a time. Parents everywhere take all that on to find a school that fits the kid they actually have, and they should not go it alone.
Take Arkansas. A proposed amendment there would have gutted the state’s education freedom accounts and restricted private schools. Most families had no idea it was coming. Opportunity Arkansas had the research and the reach on the ground. We took it to families in our network: what it would do, who it would cost, what they could do about it. It never made the ballot, and the microschools those families count on are still within reach.
That is the model: find the people already fighting in a state, put real resources in families’ hands, and keep going. Ayme’s son got that school because another family happened to move to her town. That is too much to leave to chance, and we don’t intend to.
