Defense Wins Championships
As a fan of Bobby Bowden’s Seminoles and Joe Gibbs’s Redskins, I’m not sure Bear Bryant’s observation that “defense wins championships” is *always* true. But an incident this summer regarding some hybrid schools in Atlanta reminds me that it sometimes is.
Late this summer, a hybrid school in Cobb County contacted me. This school rents space from a local church during the week. The county fire marshal had received a complaint about the school’s operations at the end of June, and had decided that this hybrid school needed to get a Certificate of Occupancy as a “school,” rather than as an “assembly” meeting in a church. This rule supposedly applies to any organization meeting with more than 6 students for more than 4 hours per day, or more than 12 hours per week. Without this new CO, the church would be fined $1000 per day that the school met there. This school told me the fire marshal had received other complaints, and at least two other schools in the county were getting the same directive. When word of this got out, one of the schools lost half of its enrollment and decided to close for the upcoming school year.
Eventually the Institute for Justice got involved, writing an open letter to the fire marshal as well as a news release on the story. According to IJ, regarding the burdensome surprise notice:
“In order to reapply for the new permit, the churches would need to get an architect and submit site plans to the fire marshal, who would then inspect the buildings. After the inspection, the fire marshal could require the churches to make upgrades to their buildings that could total thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. One pod, Arrows Academy, already shut down because of the crackdown last week.”
Suranjan Sen, one of IJ’s attorneys, told Axios about this situation, “If it's safe enough for Sunday school, then it's safe enough for Monday school.”
An administrator for Arrows Academy said more about the disruption to the Marietta Daily Journal:
“We employ 20 teachers that are now without jobs…We had about 120 to 130 students, and so all of those were expecting to start school in the next two weeks, and now they have to scramble.”
The Georgia Public Policy Foundation picked up on the story too, and many more discussions than I know about were surely going on in the background.
The possible resolutions to this kind of situation are mostly not ideal. One option, as Arrows Academy shows, is for the schools threatened like this to simply close. A second is to comply with the order. Hybrid schools (like St. John the Baptist Hybrid School, mentioned in the stories above) are very often hosted by churches or other facilities. They don’t own them, and so the host facility has its own decisions to make about tangling with their local fire marshal. The third option is to push back. This is what IJ strongly suggested. In this case, Georgia’s 2021 state “learning pods” law seems likely to have protected these schools. The “Georgia Learning Pods Protection Act” statute literally reads:
“Otherwise, each learning pod shall be exempt from statutes, rules, regulations, guidelines, or other regulatory provisions imposed by the state, local governments, or local school systems, including, but not limited to, the following:
(C) Any state or local building or fire codes applicable to educational or child care facilities.”
It seems that the Georgia episode is over for now, but this is the kind of problem that could occur all over the country. This is potentially a real threat to these schools. At the same time, I have written about how hybrid school leaders do not seem to be clamoring for policy assistance:
“Unlike groups in states with no charter schools or charter school laws, or states with little private school choice, these hybrid homeschools are generally not seeking help from their state legislatures in order to boost their numbers. Nor are they asking for legal or political obstacles to be removed.”
Instead, they mostly seem to want to be left alone. And this makes sense. Many of these entrepreneurs have been running schools for years, right into the headwinds of NCLB, of Common Core, and of COVID, with no help from anyone but their state homeschooling laws. They’re not waiting around for political help or permission before starting schools. They’re just starting them.
But, this fire marshal case may demonstrate how policy can help hybrid and other nonconventional microschool arrangements. The schools mentioned in the stories above would probably not have called themselves as “learning pods.” But the schools Georgia’s learning pods law included probably would cover them. Rather than writing laws and regulations seeking to prod the school market in a particular direction, or to try to encourage a particular kind of school format to take root, policymakers might consider instead working to set boundaries for other regulatory actors, and to box out those who would try to shut interesting models down. Many of these schools have been operating and iterating for a long time; the sector is just higher profile now in large part due to COVID. Policymakers might consider playing more defense: preventing those predisposed to regulate everything they see from doing so, and simply working to make it easier for the education entrepreneurs involved in hybrid schools and microschools to keep doing what they’re doing, as they have been for a few decades now.