A School Without Borders: How Some Student Athletes, Entrepreneurs, and Homeschoolers Are Using School Choice

Every day as many as 3,500 students from all over the world log on to the same online school.

They all attend Laurel Springs School, a fully online, accredited K-12 school with no brick-and mortar-presence that operates throughout the United States as well as in 100 countries.

Laurel Springs serves a broad array of students who want a non-traditional education, including homeschoolers, high-performing student athletes who travel frequently, student entrepreneurs, and students who excel at a particular subject and need a challenge.

For Alyssa Tormala, head of Laurel Springs, her work quickly became more than just a job.

“It became a real personal mission of mine that every student out there that needs Laurel Springs should know about us,” she told EdChoice in an interview.

Before Laurel Springs, Alyssa spent 17 years as an educator and leader in private, brick-and-mortar school settings. During that time, she experienced the limitations of these settings firsthand, such as the lack of options for students who need extra courses or students with medical conditions who couldn’t physically make it to class in person for months at a time.

All Laurel Springs students need is a computer and the Internet, and the school supports them with one-on-one teachers and counselors. Students can enroll full-time or part-time.

Alyssa said that at 35 years old, Laurel Springs was actually the country’s very first online K-12 school.

“We really started charting that course right from the beginning when the Internet was just kind of coming into its own as a publicly available tool,” Alyssa said.

In the early days, Laurel Springs faced questions like how to set up a learning management system, how to get accredited, and how to participate in the National Honor Society as an online school.

“At the time, people didn’t think online school was a real thing,” Alyssa said. “So our founder and her group had to really do a lot of work in the early stages to establish us.”

“Our founder talks about the early days of trying to do online learning when everybody was on dial-up and modem,” she added, “and seeing those little error messages where it said, ‘We’re sorry, the squirrels have eaten our wires.’”

Alyssa said families choose Laurel Springs for three core reasons — flexibility, the high-level academics, and what she calls the “human connection.” Laurel Springs has a huge social community program that includes field trips, clubs, and both virtual and in-person activities.

“It’s bigger than I’ve ever seen any other school be able to do, and it’s really fun to be a part of,” she said.

Some of the families who enroll may not have access to high-level, private college preparatory education in their local area, Alyssa said. So far, 438 colleges and universities including Ivy Leagues have accepted students from the 2026 graduating class, she said.

This year, Laurel Springs is an approved ESA vendor for the first time.

Laurel Springs participates in four states’ ESA programs — Arizona, Arkansas, Alabama, and New Hampshire. They continue to research other states and hope to participate in more ESA programs in the future.

“We started to see a rising interest from our families in being able to use these kinds of fundings. We wanted to make sure we were addressing that to the best of our ability,” Alyssa said.

However, opening their doors to ESA funds has come with challenges.

“It’s actually a tough space for an online program that doesn’t live in one particular state,” Alyssa said.

She explained that some ESA programs are designed to keep the funds within the state. For example, Laurel Springs is not eligible to participate in Florida or Texas, states with two of the largest ESA ecosystems.

“It makes sense. The state programs are trying to keep the money within their borders. But also, you want to give families that flexibility too. So that’s really tough,” she said. “It has taken us some time over the last year and a half or so to do the research and narrow the scope of, which programs do we think we’re eligible for? How do we get involved with those?”

“For some of our families, being able to access ESA funding could make the difference. That could be the reason they’re able to send their child to a private school versus having other limited options,” Alyssa said. “We’re not going to be able to do it all, and we recognize that, but we’re trying to make as much possibility open to families as we can.”

Alyssa’s advice to families trying to figure out the best education environment for their child is simply to “know your student backwards and forwards.”

“I think more and more families are recognizing that no one size fits all,” Alyssa said.

For more, listen to our podcast with Alyssa Tormala.