{"id":35270,"date":"2024-10-11T19:12:26","date_gmt":"2024-10-11T19:12:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/keepcalmnprofit.com\/2024\/10\/11\/friday-feature-onward-learning\/"},"modified":"2024-10-11T19:12:26","modified_gmt":"2024-10-11T19:12:26","slug":"friday-feature-onward-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/keepcalmnprofit.com\/2024\/10\/11\/friday-feature-onward-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday Feature: Onward Learning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Colleen Hroncich<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota is the poorest area in the nation, says Mary Jo Fairhead, a former public school teacher who grew up on the reservation. \u201cI love it, but there are a lot of life issues,\u201d she explains. \u201cA lot of poverty, a lot of addiction issues. Our kids struggle with suicide and high dropout rates. Just a lot of hard things. And that\u2019s really why I became a teacher\u2014because I wanted to help kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

But when she got to the classroom, she didn\u2019t feel like she was really helping. \u201cClass sizes were huge, and I couldn\u2019t get real meaningful lessons planned because I was just putting out fires all the time,\u201d she recalls. \u201cI got really frustrated with how the system was set up and the kids I was seeing falling through the cracks.\u201d Her frustrations\u2014with the discipline techniques, the structure of the day, the curriculum, and all the testing\u2014pushed her to quit teaching.<\/p>\n

After being home with her kids for a few years, she took a position as principal of a small preK\u20118 public school. Mary Jo says she was excited about the job because, as principal, she figured she\u2019d be able to do things the way she thought they should be done. \u201cI really did enjoy that job. It was so hard emotionally, but I felt like we were doing some really good things. The kids were really making progress, and the teachers felt comfortable with me,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

The main downside was the amount of testing they had to do\u2014because their test scores were low, the kids had to do even more testing. \u201cWe were testing like five to six weeks out of the year, and that wasn\u2019t even including the progress monitoring,\u201d she says. \u201cWe had benchmark, we had the state testing, and then we had the progress monitoring. So it was just all this time around testing.\u201d Meanwhile, she was mainly concerned with just keeping the kids alive.<\/p>\n

Then COVID-19 hit, and they had strict lockdowns and didn\u2019t see the kids for 13 months. When they finally went back, she was glad to see the kids, but she didn\u2019t see herself there anymore. She told her husband she had to begin homeschooling or open her own school, and he said, \u201cI guess we\u2019re starting a school.\u201d She quit her job without much of a plan and created Onward Learning<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mary Jo started with six school-aged children and six in a childcare situation. She had 27 students by the end of the second year and started this year with 37 students and a long waitlist. \u201cWe just don\u2019t have the capacity for more kids,\u201d she says. \u201cWe\u2019re just growing really fast.\u201d Right now she has preschool and kindergarten in the upper level of her house, grades 1\u20134\u00a0in the lower level, and grades 5\u20138\u00a0in a space she rents. They\u2019re in the process of building a new facility that she hopes will be able to serve 60 kids for next school year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

The kids spend a lot of time outdoors; Mary Jo has 3\u00bd acres with lots of trees, a playground, and a nearby golf course. \u201cWe\u2019re outside at least two hours a day, sometimes more. If it\u2019s nice out, we bring our books outside and do all of our learning outside,\u201d she says. \u201cWe also have a garage that we\u2019ve turned into kind of an art studio. So we have a kiln in there, and we do all our painting and ceramics and things like that in there.\u201d<\/p>\n

They start each day outside no matter what the weather is. Then they come inside and have breakfast together\u2014a local mom makes home-cooked breakfast, lunch, and snack each day. They work in small groups through the morning to cover math, English, reading, and science. All of the learning is personalized, so Mary Jo evaluates students when they come so she can start them where they are rather than where they \u201cshould\u201d be.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After the core subjects, the kids have a break and then do music, art, or baking before lunch. After lunch is independent reading time, which Mary Jo says the kids love. She also reads aloud to them in the afternoons. Then they have what she calls curiosity classes. \u201cThose are anything from painting to ceramics to woodworking, nature walks,\u201d she explains. \u201cPretty much anything that they\u2019re interested in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mary Jo is finally able to teach the way she thinks it should be done. \u201cI grew up going to a really small school, they call them country schools here, with multi-age learning\u2014very similar to the microschools. And that\u2019s what I knew and that\u2019s what I loved,\u201d she says. But that\u2019s not what was happening when she was in public schools.<\/p>\n

For other teachers who are feeling the same way and want to create their own microschool or other learning environment, Mary Jo offers encouragement. \u201cReach out to find other people who have done it and just ask questions and lean on them a little bit,\u201d she says. \u201cI think the biggest thing is just to not question yourself. You can do it. It seems daunting, but it\u2019s really not.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colleen Hroncich Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota is the poorest area in the nation, says Mary Jo Fairhead, a former public school teacher who grew up on the reservation. \u201cI love it, but there are a lot of life issues,\u201d she explains. \u201cA lot of poverty, a lot of addiction issues. Our kids struggle <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":35271,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-35270","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-investing"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/keepcalmnprofit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35270"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/keepcalmnprofit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/keepcalmnprofit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keepcalmnprofit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/keepcalmnprofit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keepcalmnprofit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/keepcalmnprofit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keepcalmnprofit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keepcalmnprofit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}