Declaration of Interdependence
Notes from the 5th Annual National Hybrid Schools Conference
Guest post by Sylvia Duarte
I’m pretty sure I was invited to the very first National Hybrid Schools Conference because they were afraid no one would come. I was a hybrid school parent who had written this article about why our family chose the hybrid option. I sat safely at a table with administrators from our own school, who were there to give some practical talks, though looking at old pictures I do see folks I didn’t know then. Today, says Eric Wearne, director of the National Hybrid Schools Project, “it’s really taking on a life of its own, and it’s being more driven by the people who are actually pushing this movement along - so please just walk up and talk to strangers this weekend!”
This year’s conference was a three-day event drawing school founders, administrators, and researchers from nearly every state in the country. That meant moms and dads, public school teachers, husband-and-wife teams, policymakers, PhDs, even librarians - or some combination of the above. People running anything from a 10-student microschool to a hybrid program with hundreds of students on multiple campuses, with sometimes radically different values, approaches, and missions. Keynote speaker Coi Marie Morefield, founder of The Lab School of Memphis, remarked: “This is the most ideologically diverse room I have ever been in as an educator.” Different beliefs, she said, “But one conviction. That children deserve better than what we’ve been giving them. That’s still a radical gospel. And every single person in this room is preaching some version of it.”
She wasn’t exaggerating. The session on culturally responsive pedagogy, led in part by Dr. Shameka Gerald of The Liminal Lab, drew a mostly Black microschool audience and asked pointed questions about whether flexibility alone constitutes innovation, or whether culture should lead. “Why are people afraid of criticality?” asked a panelist. A few rooms over, a classical co-op leader growing it into a hybrid school discussed which Great Books worked best for the school-home partnership. The sheer number of neurodiverse and self-directed schools stood out, marked by colorful buttons attached to lanyards, and are probably worth their own “part two” article.
This is the civic story of the school choice movement that we don’t hear much about. Gerard Robinson, professor at the University of Virginia and former Secretary of Education for both Florida and Virginia, drew on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, suggesting that what this room represented wasn’t merely a declaration of independence from failing systems - it was something more interesting. “Call this a declaration of interdependence,” he said. “You have people in this room who eat different food, come from different zip codes, voted for different people, read different books - but you come together on one thing. Learning matters.” He also offered a pointed observation about why established institutions push back so hard: “The opposite of love, biblically speaking, isn’t hate - it’s fear. And what you represent to them is fear.”
Tocqueville would have recognized the room. Where his countrymen looked to the state to fix things, the Americans he observed rolled up their sleeves. The farmers, tradespeople, and merchants he marveled at didn’t wait for direction, they formed associations and raised up the institutions their communities needed. The people here are doing the same thing, except their institutions meet two or three days a week and have very strong opinions about book return policies.
The sessions reflected the full, chaotic spectrum of what it means to build a school from scratch. There were practical deep-dives on profit-and-loss statements, multiple income streams, and how to survive regulatory scrutiny - the unglamorous operational content that most school founders never covered in any education class they ever took. Researchers from Kennesaw State presented on “Measuring What Matters” - documenting mental health and belonging in child-led schools. Sessions also covered project-based learning, AI-powered classrooms, neurodiversity as a driver of innovation rather than merely a challenge to accommodate, and how to integrate live online classes without losing the relationships that make these schools work in the first place.
At a session on lessons from hybrid schools 10+ years in operation, I asked about what the founders had to compromise on, financially, philosophically, or otherwise. “Hiring teachers without education degrees. I never thought I’d cave on that. But we have a pastor teaching our theology class, and he’s wonderful,” said one administrator. Then the conversation somehow turned to trash pickup. “I made the boys watch me clean the bathroom,” said one school leader. “I cleaned it very, very slowly.”
The questions people came with ranged from sweeping to granular. One founder building out a high school program wanted to know which three days of the week made the most sense to meet. Another had been losing hundreds of dollars in unreturned books; the room immediately rallied with solutions: withhold report cards, use an automated checkout system. Some founders are trying to build community. Some have a problem with too much of it. That’s when an email reminder goes out stating that, no, you can’t drop kids off early. Someone asked how to handle the massive amount of materials shuttling back and forth between home and school days. “We have a solution to that,” a founder offered. “It’s called very large backpacks.” Or keep a copy at school so the textbook can stay home, said another. One woman, thinking of starting a school, raised her hand and said she had a very simple question: what exactly is the difference between a hybrid school and a microschool?
As one founder put it, the best conversations can actually happen between the sessions - when people with the same problems find each other and work it out.
Dr. Richelle Brooks was once a teenage mother and briefly homeless. Today she runs a public charter school in California for high school dropouts. At one point she stood up and explained that her school is being shut down at the end of June over a political dispute about metrics, leaving 300 teens with nowhere else to go except back to the schools they already left.
At the conference she worked through how to transition from a charter school to something new - three separate microschools. “I’m learning we can use the 501(c)(3) to open a microschool and get funding through grants and churches to supplement what parents in our communities can afford,” she said.
“There’s a huge gap with traditional public schools meeting the needs of underserved communities while simultaneously forcing them to attend those schools,” she said. “I’ve been a huge advocate for alternatives. To hear anyone else talk about alternative forms of education is like - these are my people.”
Robinson closed with a challenge: “I want to encourage you to remain unpopular.” Fifty years from now, he said, someone will look back and wonder what took so long. “So keep up the revolution.”