Friday Feature: Baker Creek Academy and TrailblazED
“I learned over the years of homeschooling that all of my kids were different,” says Arizona mom Denise Lever, who homeschooled her three children through high school. One was very academic and wanted to attend a top college, another was more artsy, and the third was very musical and mechanical.
Denise was also a homeschool consultant, which generally involved helping people through educational crises. “Parents didn’t know what they were legally obliged to do and what their next steps were,” she recalls.
Then COVID-19 hit, and a friend asked Denise to homeschool her children. The friend had been asking for years, and Denise had previously said no. But by 2020, Denise’s youngest was in eighth grade, and she felt like she had “enough bandwidth to do well by other people’s children outside of my own.”
Denise launched Baker Creek Academy as a Prenda microschool in 2020 with seven students, including her youngest son. In year two, one family had a medical crisis that forced them to move to Phoenix for care, so they nearly left the microschool. But Denise was able to help them stick with it by meeting over Zoom at all hours and keeping the kids on track.
When things settled down, the family moved back to their community, but the dad had lost his job and benefits. The mom needed to find work, but she wanted to be near her kids after all they’d been through. Denise brought her in as an assistant in the microschool, and then they worked together to open a second microschool in the same building. The other mom took the younger kids, and Denise took the older ones.
“That was kind of when it pivoted for me,” says Denise. Beyond helping a few kids in her community, she saw the potential to scale not just to support more kids but also to provide opportunities for women who were already doing this work but weren’t being paid for it. In 2022, Arizona expanded its Empowerment Scholarship Accounts to universal access, which enabled more parents to join—and launch—microschools.
For the 2022–23 school year, they moved into a larger commercial building and opened a third microschool. The following year, they had five microschools in the building. “We’ve just kind of grown ever since. And once our commercial building reached capacity, we then opened in-home microschools in our neighboring community,” Denise says. She now has eight K‑8 microschools—four in her building and four operating in homes, a virtual microschool, and two high school cohorts. On top of all that, Denise runs TrailblazED Microschool Leadership Forge, a leadership development program for microschool founders.
Each microschool is independent, and owners choose their own pedagogies and students. “We collaborate on finding and placing students so that we can serve our community best,” says Denise. There are some basic requirements to be part of the TrailblazED network. Some are philosophical, such as offering a learner-driven education, putting family first, and all students are considered homeschoolers. Others are on the business side, including background checks, fingerprinting, knowing CPR, insurance, and business licenses. The average number of students in her microschools is ten, and Denise recommends starting with just six to eight students in a founder’s first year. “I set the limit at 12 because after that, you’re no longer small, really, you can’t facilitate in the same way,” she adds.
The four microschools in the shared space are Baker Creek Academy. “The building functions as a learning center, and we facilitate learning for homeschoolers, our microschools, and also we tutor public school students,” Denise explains.
Denise is the only one who currently follows the Prenda microschool model. The day starts with connect time called CAMP—Community, Autonomy, Mindset, and Purpose—where they “work on just being a good human” and building basic, durable skills. Next is a two-hour academic period that includes reading, writing, and arithmetic. “It’s completely student-driven,” says Denise. “Children are allowed to choose to block their time—they can do math one day and language arts the next. Or they can start something, and if it becomes a struggle and they need to, like, walk away from that math lesson or whatever, they can reorient their time.”
All of the Baker Creek cohorts have a shared lunch period, which gives them what Denise calls “vertical socializations”—kindergarten through high school reading, playing, and eating together. After lunch is literary time, which can involve individual or shared reading with book club-type discussions. In the afternoon, they have a rotating hour called “collaborate time.” During this segment, Denise leads a junior high history cohort, while another teacher leads the science cohort. They rotate days to reach everyone.
The last hour of the day is create time, where the kids are allowed to work on a project that will produce something for their end-of-the-year demonstration called Project Palooza. “It’s almost always some kind of fabrication of something,” Denise explains. “It runs the gamut.” Some students make jewelry for businesses they’re developing or games. Last year, one boy rebuilt a miniature Jeep for his little sister, which involved plastic welding since it was warped, installing a new steering wheel, and redoing the wiring and transmission.
While Denise is very positive about her experiences, there have been challenges—some stemming from the local public school monopoly’s opposition to competition. A family who was new to town attended Baker Creek Academy and loved it so much that she wanted to start her own in-home microschool. Someone on the school board unsuccessfully tried to block her from opening. Around 10 days after this “very, very public meeting about them not wanting her to be able to open,” Denise says, “I get a call from the state fire marshal saying, ‘We want to inspect your school tomorrow at 10 o’clock.’”
Denise pushed back, explaining they’re not a school, they have their business licenses, and they’ve already been inspected by the city and their fire department. “We’ve been in operation 2½ years in this building,” she told them. “’Why now, 10 days after someone from the school board doesn’t want us to open a new microschool?’ They didn’t have any answers for that.”
Denise contacted the Stand Together Edupreneur Resource Center for legal help, and they connected her with the Institute for Justice. With that backing, the state eventually capitulated and admitted the microschools weren’t under their jurisdiction. She’s waiting to see what happens after the city inspects them at the end of this school year, but she’s prepared for anything.
Given that experience, it’s not surprising that Denise’s first piece of advice for would-be founders is to find out what you are—and are not—legally required to do. The Stand Together legal team “has a very robust system for finding out what you’re actually legally responsible for in your state, because every state is different,” she adds. Once you find out what you need to do, she recommends “working with your local authorities to make sure that what you’re doing meets their threshold and that you’re doing your due diligence.”
And if trouble pops up? “Really hold the line,” Denise emphasizes. “One of the reasons we were ready to move ahead with the lawsuit is that this would have affected every microschool in the state of Arizona if the state had been able to enforce this on us. And it had nothing to do with the state. It had everything to do with the local school district being threatened by us.”