I was a single mother who wanted the school to see my son. They didn't. So I built one that would.

A different kind of essay

I've written most of these essays trying to explain a philosophy. This one is going to be personal. Because the truth is, EduPrep wasn't born from a philosophy. It was born from a feeling — one I carried as both a teacher and as a mother — that something was wrong with what was happening to kids in front of me, and that no one in a position to change it seemed to be in a hurry to do so.

So I'm going to tell you the part of the story I usually leave out.

My son

I've spent fifteen years teaching middle schoolers in Montgomery. During those years, I also raised a son of my own — by myself, for most of it. He went through the same schools where I taught, and he was a particular kind of child: smart, sensitive, observant. The kind of kid who would notice if something in the room shifted and not say anything but spend the rest of the evening thinking about it.

He needed to be seen. Not in a needy way. In the way most kids that age need to be seen — by an adult outside their family who notices who they actually are. Someone who can say: I see what you're good at. I see what you care about. I see who you're becoming.

That was the part the schools couldn't give him. Not because the teachers were bad — many of them were excellent. But because in a classroom of thirty, the math simply doesn't work. You can't know thirty students well enough to truly see any one of them. It isn't a personal failing. It's a structural one. And my son was paying the cost of that structural failure with his childhood.

The conversation I kept having with myself

For a long time I told myself the same thing every educator I respected was telling themselves: the system is what it is, and the work is to be the best teacher I can be inside it. I doubled down on my own classroom. I made sure that for the students who landed with me, the year was meaningful. I prayed that the next year would bring someone who would carry it forward.

But I couldn't control what came next. And year after year, I would watch promising kids lose ground. The girl who'd been on fire in sixth grade math would be checked-out by eighth grade. The boy who used to ask the best questions would have learned to stop asking. I would see them in the hallway and barely recognize them. Same face. Different kid.

Meanwhile my own son was at home, getting quieter at dinner, telling me less about his day, asking fewer of the questions he used to ask freely. And I had the unique terrible experience of being able to predict exactly what was about to happen to him, because I had watched it happen to dozens of kids before — and being unable to do anything about it from inside the system.

The night I started writing it down

I don't remember the exact night, but I remember the feeling. It was a school night, late, after my son had gone to bed. I was at the kitchen table trying to grade papers and instead I started writing notes on a separate page. Not a lesson plan. Something else.

The notes were a list of everything I would change about a school if I could change everything. Class size. The way subjects were sequenced. The way students moved between teachers. How mastery was assessed. How identity was taken seriously. How the relationship between school and family worked. How a sixth grader would be welcomed in the first week. How the year would end.

It was a list of about thirty things. I looked at the list. And I had a thought I had been actively avoiding for years: somebody could actually build this. There's no reason it has to stay a list.

The hard part

I'm not going to pretend it was easy. Leaving a stable teaching job — with benefits, with retirement, with the credibility of fifteen years inside the system — to start a school as a single mother is exactly as scary as it sounds. I had a child to support. I had no savings cushion of any size that would matter. I had no business background. I had no investors. What I had was conviction and a stack of notes.

The first year of planning was the hardest year of my life. There were nights I sat at the kitchen table with my head in my hands wondering what I had done. There were mornings I woke up certain I had been crazy to think I could pull this off. What kept me going was a very simple and very terrible thought: if I don't do this, the kids I'm trying to build it for will go to the same schools I've been watching not work for them. I couldn't let that thought go.

So I kept going. I researched microschool models. I studied developmental psychology more deeply than I ever had. I met with families. I met with potential teachers. I learned the regulatory side, the financial side, the licensing side. I learned how the Alabama CHOOSE Act could make EduPrep accessible to families who wouldn't have been able to consider private school otherwise. I built, piece by piece, the thing the notes on the kitchen table had described.

What EduPrep is, in plain terms

EduPrep Academy is the school I wished existed when my son was in middle school. It's the school I wished I could send the students I taught when I knew their next teacher wouldn't have time to see them properly. It's small on purpose, with class sizes that make it possible to actually know each student. It teaches at the real level of each student, not at the calendar-assumed level. It treats identity formation and character development as core academic priorities — not extras.

It's built for the student in the middle — the one who wants to be there, the one at a crossroads who needs adults around them who notice. The kind of kid my son was. And the kind I watched lose ground year after year in classrooms of thirty.

To the parent reading this

If you've read this far, I want to say a few honest things to you.

First: you aren't crazy to feel that something is off about the environment your child is in. Parents have very accurate instincts about what their child is becoming. If you feel that the school isn't seeing your child, that's information worth taking seriously.

Second: there are more options than there used to be. The Alabama CHOOSE Act has opened doors that were closed five years ago. Microschools have grown precisely because parents like you have been quietly looking for something else. You are not alone in this — even if it feels that way.

Third: if you've read this far and any of this resonates, I'd like to talk with you. Not pitch to you. Talk with you. About your child. About what you're seeing. About whether EduPrep is or isn't the right place for them. I respond to every inquiry personally, within 24 hours. Because I built this for parents like you, and the conversation matters.

I built EduPrep because I couldn't bear to watch one more kid disappear. I'm still in this work for exactly the same reason.

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