How It Started
Alex Cheung’s son was gifted at math and struggled at reading. He was the kind of kid who could work two grade levels ahead in one subject and one grade level behind in another, and no schedule I had access to as a principal could hold both truths at once. I tried anyway. I left the public school system before I could see it through.
Alex was frustrated too. So he did what I couldn’t do from inside a public school system. He started his own school. Wilderland Academy, in Eden, Utah, exists because a dad decided his son needed an education built around his needs.
That is the whole argument in one family, and it’s the question every back-to-school season forces on parents: does this school actually fit my kid? School choice policy is about the students who don’t fit the public school model. Microschools are school choice for teachers. They are the schools being built by educators who left traditional systems to create the learning environments those same students need.
I have spent almost five years at Libertas Institute working on both halves of that argument. This is what I learned.
Utah Fits All
Utah Fits All passed in 2023 as a broad education savings account program, funding a variety of education options from traditional private schools to microschools, hybrid schools, and homeschools. Getting it passed took a lot of work. It took over 2,000 parents, students, and teachers showing up at the Capitol to advocate for it, and it took a legislature that voted for it with more than two-thirds of both houses. That supermajority wasn’t an accident.
We wanted it specifically because it prevents teacher groups from organizing a referendum, the same tool that overturned an earlier Utah school choice law in 2008. Part of getting there meant pairing the push with a teacher pay raise, since the governor had made clear he wouldn’t sign anything until teacher pay averaged above $50,000. We built a coalition wide enough to clear both bars at once.
The program now funds around 20,000 students. One mother used her scholarship to pay tuition at a small, part-time microschool and put the rest toward a dyslexia tutor. Her child grew multiple grade levels in a single year. That is what “fits all” is supposed to mean.
The program isn’t perfect. In 2025, the legislature restructured funding into three tiers instead of one flat amount, and that change opened the door to fraud and misuse risk that a single amount didn’t have. A lawsuit challenging the program’s constitutionality is pending. Roughly 8,000 students are on a waitlist right now, waiting for funding that doesn’t exist yet. None of that is resolved. All of it needs to be.
There’s a second problem tucked inside the first one. Utah Fits All includes a formal definition of “private school” that determines which schools qualify for its top funding tier, and that definition is a real hindrance to microschool founders trying to build something new. Getting it right matters for the same reason funding levels matter. A program built to serve kids who don’t fit shouldn’t exclude the schools built to serve them.
The Unexpected Burden on Microschools
Microschools are small schools with an average size of 15 students. Some schools are part time, acting as a supplement to homeschooling, while others are full time providing an entire education program to children.
The origin of Libertas’s microschool work was a listening session in August 2022, organized by Kerry McDonald, a national advocate for new school models. This meeting allowed Libertas to hear directly from microschool founders about what was stopping them. Some of what we heard was a business problem, outside what policy could fix. Two things weren’t.
Cities were denying permits to microschools within their limits, and building code was forcing founders into expensive renovations that prevented some schools from opening.
Before we passed our changes, Alex Cheung’s 10-student school was told it needed an integrated pest management plan, a dedicated nurse’s room, and a contracted doctor or nurse, requirements built for buildings far larger than his.
Ian Lindsey, founder of Acton Academy St. George, paid over $500,000 to find and modify a building to code before he could open his school at all. Paul Tanner, founder of Choice Academy, in Woods Cross, went looking for a location and had one city tell him outright that they don’t allow private schools within their boundaries.
None of those founders were doing anything unsafe. They were running into rules written for a different kind of school. One that had high student populations and classrooms with almost 30 students.
The bill that fixed this was introduced in 2024 and passed in 2025. It permits microschools in every zone in Utah and lets them operate in a range of building types without major modification. Getting there meant finding compromise with the State Fire Marshal and the League of Cities and Towns.
Being willing to adjust to what we felt were reasonable requests is what let the bill move quickly once that groundwork was in place.
That law is not something we can pass once and walk away from. In 2026, a city approached a legislator with a bill that would have limited microschools from opening in residential zones, the same kind of exclusion Paul Tanner ran into before the law existed. Through our work we were able to modify that bill to reemphasize the compromises made with the League of Cities and Towns without changing the reduced regulations we worked to remove.
Continued attention will be necessary to keep this law from being undermined.
How It’s Going
With back-to-school season in full swing, I see a promising future for Utah’s students moving forward. Utah Fits All is serving 20,000 students with 8,000 on the waitlist. Multiple school founders have reached out to tell us how easy it was to open their school, the new law providing a clear path to opening.
Working on these changes has given me a front row seat to amazing things being created, serving kids in unique and meaningful ways. Schools have been built to serve students with autism and ADHD. New schools have been built in both of Utah’s big cities and small towns.
And Alex’s Wilderland Academy is thriving. He has 20 students and a waitlist. He reports two times the learning for students in his school. This is what I wanted to accomplish. In fact, I’ve been so inspired that my wife and I are opening our own school this month, Horizon School in the Ogden/Layton area.
Libertas has laid the foundation for amazing changes in education over the past 5 years. And based on what I’m seeing, the next 5 years will continue to see students getting what they need, accomplishing great things, and leading to a life of abundance. And I’m here for it.
