“If You Can Dream It, You Can Build It:” An Indiana Microschool Story

Microschooling up close at EdChoice’s National School Choice Week event

“I know how to educate children. I’m figuring out how to run a business,” Jill Haskins, director of Kainos Microschool said at a National School Choice Week event hosted by EdChoice last week.

“It’s not something I enjoy doing, but I do it because the kids are worth it,” she shared.

Haskins, who also founded the Indiana Microschool Network, spoke to a room of advocates and others who gathered to hear from education trailblazers building something new within K–12 education: microschools.

Her panel highlighted how these small, flexible learning environments are meeting needs that traditional systems often struggle to address, especially for students who don’t fit neatly into a standard classroom model.

Haskins painted a vivid picture of what microschooling looks like on the ground.

Microschools often emerge organically when parents and educators are tired of the old system and can’t find what their children need. They pop up in homes, churches, commercial spaces, and even on farms.

In Indiana, microschools average about 13 kids each for a total of about 1,300 kids in microschools across the state, Haskins said. Indiana has 92 microschools, with another 30 to 40 considering launching next fall, she said, and most provide full-time education.

The state has no formal legal definition of a microschool, which allows for wide variation in structure and philosophy. Microschools may be structured as LLCs or 501(c)(3)s, and they often blend elements of homeschooling, online learning, and in-person instruction. That flexibility has led to a wide range of models, including nature-based schools, classical education programs, Montessori-inspired environments, and both secular and faith-based microschools.

“If you can dream it, you can build it,” Haskins said.

Funding varies as well. Most microschools rely primarily on private tuition and education savings accounts (ESAs). Some microschools are accredited, making them eligible for scholarship granting organization (SGO) funds and school choice scholarships. However, many are hesitant to tap into those funds because of the administrative burden and restrictions involved.

Haskins was candid about the challenges of getting started, especially in rural areas, where many microschools “hang on for dear life that first year” because families wait to see how a school fares before enrolling.

Today, Haskins has a teaching license, but she didn’t initially set out to start a school.

“I was going to bring my two kids home to homeschool,” she said. “But word got out, and then I had 11 kids in my living room.”

Haskin’s microschool, Kainos Microschool is accredited, faith-based, and currently serves 25 students in a former strip mall in Fort Wayne, Indiana. They are moving soon to a larger space that will allow the school to double enrollment — currently Kainos has a waiting list of 28 students.

Her “modern one-room schoolhouse,” as Haskins calls it, serves 1^st through 12^th graders. Tuition is $8,000 per year, and most of the students are funded by education savings accounts.

“If they don’t qualify for an ESA it’s really difficult for our private-paying families to pay $800 a month for their child’s education,” Haskins said.

Kainos employs a full-time teacher, a full-time assistant, and a part-time assistant director. The school uses public transportation for field trips, which the kids love, Haskins said, and there are also seven homeschool students who drop in for writing class. Kainos’ student athletes are even NCAA-approved, and one is on track to be a professional athlete.

“We focus really highly on independence and individualized learning, project-based learning,” Haskins said.

More than half of Kainos’ students arrived last fall three or more grade levels behind academically. Today, just halfway through the school year, about half of the microschool’s students are within two years of grade level.

Kainos’ students include those with ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia, autism, and mental health challenges. Sixty-eight percent are boys — most in middle school — and 28 percent of the kids are adopted, which comes with its own challenges.

Running a microschool comes with a mess of navigating legislative and regulatory issues.

In February, the fire marshal shut down Haskins’ microschool just before she went in for surgery for kidney cancer because she needed an educational variance for her building.

“Lots of tears and fighting and pleading and filing things with Department of Homeland Security and paying an architect a lot of money, and we finally got it changed,” Haskins said. “But it was a nightmare. Zoning and building are really difficult for microschools.”

To Haskins, seeing the children succeed makes it all worth it.

Haskins held back tears as she remembered one high school girl with mental health issues whose biggest achievement when she came to Kainos was simply staying safe and graduating. Today, that student is thriving.

This year, one of Kainos’ 10^th grade students is doing a cadet teaching program with the MathTrack Institute, and she will come out of high school with essentially an associate’s degree.

Joining Haskins was Dr. Kevin Berkopes, co-founder and CEO of the MathTrack Institute, which focuses on building the educator pipeline through innovative teaching apprenticeships.

Berkopes shared the story of a woman who had accumulated more than 70 college credits but was told her years of classroom experience wouldn’t count toward licensure.

“We granted the dignity behind the years of experience,” he said. She completed the program within a year and is now a licensed teacher in Indianapolis — just in time, she told him, to graduate before her own children finished high school.

Haskins’ passion for her microschool work was palpable. Berkopes added to her hopeful vision with his excitement about the fresh pathways his group offers aspiring teachers.

During National School Choice Week, they offered a powerful reminder that education works best when it adapts to students, not the other way around.