Holding a clear system-level vision for your public microschool(s) will enable your design team to make a series of cascading decisions that stem from, align with, and uphold that purpose.

For example, if your goal is to retain learners who might leave your school system, the way you navigate funding will be different than if your goal is to increase enrollment by attracting learners who have already left. If one of your goals were to offer students more access to college courses, you would approach your design differently than you would if your goal were to provide more personalized learning to under-credited learners.

Your vision may include multiple parts (e.g., retaining students by offering a more personalized learning environment). As you choose the school’s design, you will circle back to your purpose and determine which part to prioritize, when, and to what end. In this way, your purpose is your North Star, guiding your entire design process.

Guiding Questions

What purpose will a public microschool serve within your system?

• What needs exist in your community (e.g., what population isn’t being served, what is driving enrollment decline, etc.)?
• How will a public microschool meet one or more of those needs?
• How will you center access for all learners in your purpose?
• How do the benefits compare to the costs of introducing complexity that benefits a small number of learners (at least to start)?
• How do public microschools connect to your system’s strategy? (Consider enrollment, learner outcomes, etc.)

Action Steps

Assess your system’s needs. While you may have hunches about what to address, you should have concrete data (e.g., enrollment numbers, learner outcome data, stakeholder survey data, focus groups, and interview findings) to back them up.

Consider system priorities. Aligning what you discover about your system’s needs with what you are already prioritizing will help build conviction and coalition among leadership. It may also position you to leverage capacity (i.e., people, money) that is dedicated to ongoing initiatives. 

Create a purpose statement. This concise statement should outline the answers to your guiding questions:

• the need you seek to address
• how a public microschool will meet that need
• how it aligns to your system’s overall strategy
• how benefits will outweigh the costs to the system in the short and long term

Tips and Examples

• Purdue Polytechnic High School (PPHS) is a public charter network in Indiana. They created a 40-student microschool to address the 4-10% of students who “fell through the cracks” and needed a different approach to learning. A secondary reason for designing a microschool was to fulfill the goal of expanding their network throughout Indiana: they wanted to incubate a version for smaller communities that could not sustain their comprehensive approach.
• Edgecombe County Public Schools created a temporary “school within a school” for 30 students to incubate innovative practices they later incorporated into their comprehensive schools. The microschool did not last beyond its initial year, which was by design.
• A system could open a hybrid microschool to meet the needs of families seeking increased flexibility, particularly those with children who are serious athletes or artists.

Opportunity and Access

Given its size, a microschool cannot serve all learners. To meet its stated purpose, who is the school designed to serve? Who might be excluded? How might you resolve this?

For example, if you plan to offer a hybrid high school to serve families who need schedule flexibility, you probably won’t want to market only to families who frequently travel. Your school may serve these families well and include them, but it should not be designed exclusively for them when it could offer flexibility to meet the needs of others. Also, how will serving a subset of learners provide further opportunity for all in the school system more broadly?