In spring of 2022, we held the inaugural National Hybrid Schools Conference on campus at Kennesaw State University, near Atlanta. When we opened registration, I had no idea how things would go; I was frankly a little bit nervous that I would be asking friends to come the week of, just to fill seats. The reality was…different. We hit capacity for our venue 6 weeks early. See photos and videos of those sessions here.
This year, we planned for a larger event. We stayed in Atlanta but moved closer to town, and secured a larger space. We had to charge registration fees for the first time (though we still offered travel support for school people who needed it). Taylor Swift and Janet Jackson were both in town performing the same weekend. And the conference grew in size by over 50%. I suspect next year will be larger.
Both years, we have held a reception Friday evening and then the bulk of the programming all day Saturday. This means Saturday is fairly packed with sessions, but a big part of the value of this conference is the ability to meet up with other hybrid schools from around the country. And so we hope people will be able to meet others at the Friday reception. Here are a few of my remarks from Friday welcoming everyone and trying to set the stage for the weekend:
Tonight is about giving everybody a chance to just meet other people who are doing projects that are similar to yours, who you probably don’t get to meet and talk to very often because you are so insanely busy just running your schools and programs. One of the most powerful aspects of the hybrid school and microschool movement and hopefully of this conference is that it’s one of the few places in education anymore where a group of people can come together, who have strong but very different opinions on what schooling should look like, and yet still get along with each other.
Josh Gibbs, a teacher at a (non-hybrid) school in Virginia, has written about his own similar experiences visiting bars and tasting new (to him) craft beers.
“We will find ways to disagree once we leave the bar, but let us be friends for now… I need an occasional respite from arguing. I want to love something, and I want to hear about what strangers love, and I want to agree with them.”
I think that’s great and very applicable to us here. A sector that includes people who look at what 90+ percent of other people are doing –using conventional, normal schools—and who just walk away from all of that to start up their own thing, is going to be a group of people with pretty intense opinions, in lots of different directions. And I think it’s healthy to love some obscure thing like your hybrid school startup strongly, to hear about what other people love, and to get a chance to agree with them at least a little bit.
I think we were successful in maintaining that atmosphere. James Tooley was an excellent keynote speaker, and connected the dots between his work in The Beautiful Tree and Really Good Schools to the hybrid and microschool movement in the U.S.
We are processing all of the photos and videos from the conference sessions, and I am coming off of a pretty heavy lift steering the conference. So more details on some of the sessions, on the talk by Professor Tooley, the announcement of the new Hybrid Schools Society, and some other observations soon. For now, here are some of the reactions shared publicly on Twitter. They’re great, but even these don’t do justice to the positive vibe we are cultivating among a lot of really diverse, really opinionated, and really important education entrepreneurs:
EdChoice, the Yes. Every Kid. Foundation, and the VELA Education Fund made all of that possible. Thanks to them. Much more to come here, and in real life next spring.