Note from Emily: Recently, I joined a coalition of experts concerned about children’s online safety and signed on to and sent an open letter to 150 of the largest American school districts, requesting that they immediately disable YouTube and Gemini AI on school-issued devices and take a closer look at student internet use.Thanks in part to the recent social media trials in California and New Mexico, we know thatchildren’s use of YouTube, Gemini, and internet access is unsafe— the fact that children encounter all of these products on school-issued devices warrants immediate action. As we note in the letter:
A California jury found that YouTube is “dangerous or likely to be dangerous to minors when used in a reasonably foreseeable way,” and even awarded punitive damages against YouTube for acting with “malice, oppression, or fraud.” § I.b;
Lawsuits have also been filed against Google for harms to students allegedly caused by school-issued Chromebook laptops and Google’s Chrome internet browser. § I.d;
More than 1,000 school districts have sued YouTube, alleging that YouTube addicts and harms children – and that “[c]ompulsive use of YouTube by school children is causing serious problems for students and school districts” § I.a
Yetmany of these same very school districts still allow their students access to YouTube on school-issued devices. At this point, harms are occurring and school leaders face a choice— to continue providing children with internet-connected devices, or to take stock and reevaluate the use of such products in the name of protecting children.
Our goal in sending this letter is to help school districts see that inaction is a choice— that when (not if) lawsuits occur in their districts because children are experiencing harms on the devices they provide, Google and other technology companies will shift legal risks onto the district. I sent my own district Superintendent, Board Directors, and Staff a link to our letter, along with the email you see below. If I receive a response, I will update this post.
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To Superintendent Shuldiner; Seattle Public Schools District Leadership; Staff; and Board Directors--
Yesterday, on Monday, October 5, 2026, 13 organizations and experts on technology in schools, myself included, sent an open letter to the 150 largest public school districts in the country, including Seattle Schools. You should be receiving this letter via certified mail in the next few days (also attached as a PDF). Together, these districts, including Seattle, educate approximately 12.5 million students, about one-quarter of all U.S. public school students.
As I have written to the district about numerous times over the past few years, concerns about children’s use of GenAI and other EdTech products, including YouTube, continue to grow. It should be very apparent by now to school leaders that when lawsuits get filed when children encounter harmful, inappropriate, or disturbing content online, the tech companies will not side with, support, nor protect districts-- in fact, it is very clear that companies like Google will shift the legal risks of its products to school districts. We outline these risks in the letter-- I strongly encourage you and your legal counsel to read it. Our goal in signing on to this letter and sharing it with our districts is to empower you to make meaningful changes now.
In the letter, we urge districts to take three immediate steps:
1. Disable YouTube on school-issued devices. 2. Disable Gemini AI on school-issued devices. 3. Investigate student internet use on school-issued devices, share the results with the public, and reform their technology policies to ensure that students are kept safe and ready to learn.
It is my understanding that an internal audit in Seattle Public Schools found there are currently 2,000 EdTech products or apps in use. This is an astonishingly high number. I assume these are the ones considered “vetted” or “approved,” though I have no way to verify this-- perhaps you can clarify. At the bare minimum, this seems like important information for Seattle parents to be aware of.
I know there are many things happening in our schools today. I know that you get a lot of emails. I also know that children in Seattle Schools are encountering pornographic content, games, videos, chatbots, and advertisements on the devices you have deemed safe, educational, and “required” for learning.
Seattle has the potential to be a leader in doing the right thing by children and our district should not be acquiescing to pressure from technology companies who prey on vulnerable institutions and populations.
You may not share my concerns, but you should be aware of the potential risks facing our district by ignoring them.
Thanks,
Emily
The signatories of the open letter— a group of well-respected, knowledgable, courageous experts. I’m honored to be their peer.
First Fish Chronicles is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
You don’t know what any of those teachers are talking about. You don’t know the objective of the lesson. You don’t know the context of the question.
But my guess is you know the answer to each of those questions.
If you’re in any doubt, you can listen to those questions in this video and you will have very little doubt about the correct answer.
Putting it bluntly: these questions are a waste of breath and time. Math teacher questions, at minimum, should help students think more about math. Ideally, they should also give the teacher information about the student’s developing understanding. These questions, instead, invite students to think about the teacher’s intonation. They don’t give the teacher any information about how the student understands math because you don’t need to understand math to answer them.
And these questions feel great! Everyone feels successful! The kid enjoys the illusion of understanding. The teacher enjoys the illusion of a well-ordered class. But effective math teachers understand this is only an illusion.
I asked my teacher coach friend Jenna Laib, “What are alternatives to these kinds of questions?” Her answer is great.
One thing that helps is having a stock question to repeat over and over again. How do you know? How did you decide? If teachers ask the same question regardless of accuracy of the student’s answer, the students recognize that the words aren’t a hint. With practice, the tone follows.
It’s important for teachers to persist through the early stage of using a stock question, because students will be annoyed that they lost their vocal cue. Just keep going!
It also helps to think about your listening stance: are we listening for evaluative purposes? Interpretive purposes? Generative purposes? If we only ever listen with an evaluative stance, the follow-up questions and intonations give us away.
I also like opening the answer space, changing “Aren’t all these slopes positive?” to “Which of these slopes are positive?” and “Now did you have to go by 2’s?” to “What’s another way we could have counted?”
How do you keep a student’s focus on the math and not on your intonation?
Hey! I write about teaching, technology, and math on special Wednesdays. Toss your email in the box and come along! -DM
Notes from the Road
During my trip to San Diego recently, I got a chance to use the Super Wrong, Kinda Right protocol from the Practice-Driven PD team. Math teachers talk a big game about mistakes and how they’re “expected, respected, inspected, and corrected” but it’s rarer to see mistakes explicitly invited. Try out Super Wrong, Kinda Right sometime.
My fall tour continues. See you in Portland this week?
After 37 years in the classroom, the distinction between “Does this technology work?” and “What does it actually do to the experience of learning?” feels crucial to me. Education is not simply the efficient transfer of correct answers. Struggle, conversation, curiosity and even occasional frustration are part of learning. AI becomes educationally interesting when it strengthens those processes.
Odds & Ends
¶ One hundred high school students walked out of class in Vancouver, WA, chanting “No AI!” Organizer Christian Tillett named one of their demands:
I don’t think it’s fair that teachers get to use AI in lesson planning and grading and that students can’t use it for anything. I think that staff and students should be held to the exact same principles for AI usage.
¶ This article from the Wall Street Journal lines up with conversations I’m having with teachers around the country. The cumulative effect of four years of ambient generative AI on student cognition seems … not great.
In Georgia, Shannon Seibert observed the students in her high-school English class using Gemini for everything from how to draft a breakup text to asking “how many hours until 2 p.m.?” at 11:30 a.m. “They no longer trust what’s going on in their own brain,” she said.
Google’s always-on AI overview in search is shaping up to be a pretty big villain in this whole story:
When Common Sense Media tested how Google Search’s AI features react to homework questions, the tool completed kids’ homework every time, researchers found, and missed suicidal ideation and produced inaccuracies, among other problems, leading to an “unacceptable risk” rating.
It takes a lot to astonish me in edtech, but I am astonished that Google doesn’t let their district customers turn off the AI overview.
¶ ProPublica reporters opened a school with a couple of clicks. With a bit more effort, they could be eligible for public funds.
“We picked a name. We paid 45 bucks,” a ProPublica reporter noted after we submitted the application. With that, we had created a private school.
This is America, your business is what you make it, and the country’s job is to make the process of starting one easy.
I wonder if Matt (and others like him) would be so excited if ProPublica reporters could establish a hospital with a couple of clicks and collect public Medicare funds, without any standards, regulations, or inspections.
Before you explain, students need to already be thinking, wondering, predicting, or trying to resolve something. Explanations land differently when the brain is already searching for an answer.
¶ Here are three stories from higher education. In each one, professors and teachers feel the ground shift beneath them and adjust their posture in response. I don’t know if these ideas are good, but they are interesting and I admire the spirit that animates them.
I talk to a lot of old people, those who were born in the 20th century, and if I ask them what the word “unalive” means, they usually have no idea what I’m talking about, except for some of them who have kids or who study Internet culture.
This will, of course, probably seem very weird to most people who were born in or grew up in the 21st century. Just to recap for the olds: “unalive” is the word you use to represent concepts like dying, or death, or killing or being killed, on digital platforms where saying those words accurately will cause the algorithm to punish or censor you. Or, maybe, where the perception is that using those words will result in being censored by the algorithm, and no one is actually willing to find out what happens if you use the forbidden words.
This sort of attack on people’s expression started on platforms like TikTok, where nearly all content is distributed through an algorithmic feed, but has since become ubiquitous in nearly all digital media that we see. In fact, these tics are now so prevalent that it’s routine to hear people using this kind of language in everyday life, even though there’s not yet an algorithm to appease in the physical world. I’ve heard people say, out loud, “he unalived himself”, in reference to someone dying by suicide.
And all of this has become even more visible in recent days as online conversation has turned to discussion of the horrific lack of accountability around the tragic rape case at Cornell University. Across the Internet, people are routinely referring to the central crime in the case as r*pe or “grape” or even using the 🍇 emoji, without a second thought for what it means that the very word can’t be said online anymore. Or, at least, the assumption is that it can’t be said.
To be clear, I am very much in favor of people using content warnings or sensitivity markers for content, and fine with people using abbreviations like “SA” for references to disturbing or triggering topics like sexual assault; we should provide people with as much context and control as possible when choosing what information they want to consume and when. I also know that sometimes, people use lesser terms for stressful subjects like death or assault to create a bit of ironic distance from painful or upsetting topics.
But most of the different variations of wording and emojis are coming from trying to appease the platforms, and there’s a heavy cost for those who are worried about being mindful: If someone is using a tool to filter out content, it will no longer be effective because everyone is using misspellings and euphemisms and imagery to get around the algorithm.
The spread of censored and mangled syntax is happening because people believe, or have experienced, that platforms will silence them for accurately describing the world in plain language. This shit is terrible, and it has to stop.
You Were Not Born With These Constraints
One of the things that’s most concerning to me is that an entire generation has grown up not realizing how extreme it is that their very language is being chosen for them by platforms run by people who hate that generation’s ability to express itself, and who hate the things it has to say. From their youngest days, this generation grew up watching people make stupid faces at them for YouTube thumbnails and never had a chance to reflect on the fact that those creators didn’t want to be humiliating themselves by making those expressions — the demands of the algorithms of Big Tech forced them to do that.
The rituals of feeding the algorithm are so built into people’s everyday habits that they’re invisible to people who weren’t alive before today’s platforms took over. Every parent of my cohort remembers the first time they heard their toddler finish doing something cute in their living room, and then turn around and say, “please like and subscribe!” afterwards. It’s a ghastly, sickening feeling to confront the fact that our little kids were being brainwashed into thinking that every adorable thing they did should be followed by a prompt to provide data to Google.
Over on Instagram, where people originally signed up thinking they were going to see someone’s vacation pictures, or shots of their cousin’s kids, you’re now stuck watching people beg for everyone to reply with cultish phrases in the comments, which will then earn them an obviously AI-generated response in return, all in service of “showing activity” to the algorithm, like it’s an angry god that needs a sacrifice. They’re just not sure exactly what the angry god wants.
Your free speech was taken away from you, and the people who did it are the same ones who spent years pretending to care about “free expression”. They contrived examples of lack of free speech on college campuses while squashing protests, and cried crocodile tears about “cancel culture” while getting people fired for political criticism. Now they have no problem with billionaires deciding exactly what words everyone is allowed to say. Larry Ellison is not content with his family owning all of the movies and TV shows — his family has to control what words people are allowed to speak on TikTok, too. Elon Musk isn’t content to merely generate and distribute child sexual abuse material for profit — he wants to silence the messages of the few decent people who are foolish enough to remain on Twitter/X, too. (That’s why I wrote you a guide on how to get your organization off of that cursed platform.)
Now that an entire generation has grown up using these Orwellian euphemisms, and all of the Big AI products are trained on the Internet that was created under this regime, do you think today’s AI tools even know that the real, uncensored world exists? If you can’t say “genocide” on any of the major platforms, yet those are the ones all of the Big AI tools used as their training data... well, then the AI tools sure aren’t very likely to know much about genocide, are they?
Fuck the Algorithm
Our creativity can be constrained by the language we use — our imaginations are limited by what we can think to say. If we’re trained to limit the words we speak just by habit, and those limits are put in place by people whose social, political, cultural and moral goals are the opposite of what we value, then our work is unalive before it is even born.
The answer to this is simple: say what you mean. This will take, to some degree, courage. It may even take, I hesitate to say, some sacrifice. When I suggest this course of action to people, they inevitably say, “But it will cost me audience!” or “But what if I lose followers!” or “What if they demonetize me!”
Okay, what if they do? What if they do.
Are you willing to push on this? To make a point about it? To move to platforms where you can actually say what you mean? Or to remember that you already have platforms where you can say what you mean? On an email newsletter or podcast you can say whatever the hell you want and nobody can stop you. On my blog right here, I can even curse in a headline and it won’t affect anything about how my site operates.
(And a reminder: Substack is not an email newsletter, and a Spotify show is not a podcast — they’ll be unaliving your distribution any day now.)
If you are a 20th century relic like me, it is incumbent upon you to remind the generation that grew up inside the algorithm that another world is possible, and that we know this because we lived it. We were able to style a MySpace page in any way that we wanted; the code for LiveJournal was entirely open source so there was no part of the algorithm that was unknowable. A blog like the one you’re reading right now could be made by anyone, and put up for pennies, and nobody could stop it from being read by millions of people. (And that last one? It’s still possible.)
If you are from this century, forget all that rambling bullshit about ancient history: all that matters is you getting what you deserve, because you’ve been fucked over by the same billionaires who’ve poisoned your planet and infested your world with slop. The best artists around you are invisible to you, and the most important statements by activists that you care about are being silenced. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a system working as designed. And the proof is as obvious as the fact that the angriest activists you know can’t even talk about systemic abuses or state violence without having to put it in algorithmically approved speech or censoring their captions like they’re going to be read by 5-year-olds.
It should make you furious. It is time to kill “unalive”.
The response is simple:
For every message you put out, start by saying what you mean. Don’t work backwards from what the algorithm wants or what a platform permits.
Build a presence on every platform you can, even the ones where you have fewer followers or where you’re harder to find.
Tell your audience that your speech being free matters more than corporate convenience. Keep saying it, and keep it positive: independence gets them better art, better information, and more connected communities.
Build alliances with other artists, activists and people who share your values, and let them know you’re going to start sharing your work uncensored.
Start releasing your work uncensored and see where the platforms push back. (You may be surprised: sometimes you were censoring yourself in anticipation of limits that weren’t even there.)
If a platform does try to limit your reach or expression, make a LOT OF NOISE about it. Tell the press, rally your alliance, and spread the word on your other platforms, using the moment to build audience and raise support there. Get others to amplify the parts of your work that don’t violate platform policy, so the controversy drives people to the rest.
Find the others pushing back on algorithmic control of expression, and raise and praise their work when they do the same.
If we keep accepting the words that are forced upon us by TikTok and Meta and Google and all the rest, while platforms like Twitter/X allow the most hateful and harmful content in the world to be distributed completely unfettered, we’ll only see authoritarianism rise, and the harms against the vulnerable accelerate. But what breaks my heart almost as much is that we’ll see so many brilliant artists and activists and thinkers whose genius will be muted or silenced by mindless, heartless algorithms that capriciously decide who gets to say exactly what words, in what ways.
I get angry every time I think about it. The tech tycoons get ever more brazen in what they’re willing to say publicly, boasting about how they’re going to cause the end of the world, or calling for ethnic cleansing, all while putting tighter and tighter reins on the speech and expression of ordinary people. It’s time for “unalive” to die.
That’s something Ben Thompson said a recent episode of Dithering. He was referring to how he felt while trying to help his mom get control of her digital life. Everything was just too hard and convoluted and he felt embarrassed as someone who works in tech.
That very same evening, I randomly got this text from a family member.
I hear this a lot from family and friends who sit outside tech.
“Nothing works.”
“Everything is hard to use.”
“I can’t make sense of this.”
And to them I am a representative, a connection, to this pain in their lives.
And I, too, am embarrassed on behalf of the tech industry — by our collective failure.
Located just before the turnstiles in the Grand Army Plaza subway station at the north end of Brooklyn's Prospect Park is this former newsstand which is now operated by a dinosaur.
Every inch of his newsstand is occupied by dinosaur puns. There are Clawmond Joy bars, Alka-saurus tablets, Ultra Ribbed dur-rex cloaca dams, Meteor Millions scratch cards, and Meteor particle filter disposable snout masks.
Publications include Dinopolitan, Eater's Digest, The Pangaea Times, and the Maul Street Journal - headline: "Embattled Mayor Vows to End Pangaea Separation".
There's even a poster advertising Steg Yun.
Rex’s NYC Dino Store is a public art project led by Akiva Leffert and Sarah Cassidy, made possible by the MTA's Vacant Unit Activation Program.
ProPublica reporters Jennifer Smith Richards, center, and Jodi S. Cohen and Arkansas Times reporter Milo Strain research founding a private school in Little Rock. Brian Chilson/Arkansas Times
We have no business running a private school.
We’re reporters, not teachers. That doesn’t matter. Inexperience has hardly been a barrier for those who want to start their own schools, as we have reported this year. And it didn’t stop us, either.
Over the last few months, to test the process, reporters from ProPublica partnered with local journalists in three states to establish private schools. None required much effort.
In Arkansas, all it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state website, $45 and an American flag to form a bona fide private school with the Arkansas Times.
We established a school with Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia after filing our new school’s name and location with authorities on a piece of notebook paper, then exchanging a few emails.
And with The Assembly in North Carolina, we filed an online notice of intent to open a private school at Ponysaurus Brewing Co. in Durham, while perched on its metal bar stools, eyeing glasses of a crisp kolsch.
We used our names and news organization email addresses, following each state’s rules for starting private or microschools, a type of private school intended for just a few students. Experience running a school wasn’t needed. No one from any of the states asked us about our backgrounds or qualifications, though West Virginia did ask for proof of a high school diploma. No one questioned what we plan to teach or how we would measure whether students are learning.
And yet we could enroll students in two states right now, if we wanted to. Arkansas even suggested ways our school could accept public money through the state’s voucher-style program.
For the record, we are not enrolling students and have no intention of operating our new schools. We did, however, register a website for our new school ventures, ProPublicaAcademy.com, and even designed some fun pencils to show our school spirit.
This year, a team of ProPublica reporters has been documenting how the American education landscape is shifting dramatically as states use public money to help fund private schools. With few regulations, hundreds of new private and microschools have proliferated.
Our reporting has shown the relative ease with which people — some with questionable backgrounds — founded their own schools in unusual places. They’ve popped up in barns and on farms, in strip malls between an antique shop and an ax-throwing business and in churches, where lighting and sound for worship services is part of the curriculum.
All of this led to a clear reporting question: If the hurdles to open a private school are so low, could we do it? And what would we learn along the way?
Est. 2026
Arkansas: ProPublica-Arkansas Times Curiosity Academy
Inside a flag shop in Little Rock, we surveyed our options. There were handheld American flags on skinny sticks, midsize ones to display on a wall and majestic formal flags adorned with silky gold fringe.
State law in Arkansas doesn’t require much to open a private school, nothing about teacher skills or what kids learn. But it does require that all schools display an American flag, and we wanted to follow the rules. So, at the Arkansas Flag and Banner store, we decided on a smallish one that could fit in a circular base atop a newsroom cubicle. We also bought an Arkansas flag — even though only public schools are required to have those. Total cost: $49.45.
Picking the flags for our new school was the hardest part of an astoundingly easy process.
The only requirement to open a private school in Arkansas is displaying a flag and flagpole, so the team visited the local flag shop in Little Rock.Brian Chilson/Arkansas Times
Early in our reporting in Arkansas, we tried to figure out what steps we’d need to take to make a private school. We couldn’t find all the answers online, so we called the state.
“We don’t have rules for opening a private school,” Kaelin Clay, an Arkansas Department of Education spokesperson, told us earlier this year.
In fact, we didn’t even have to file anything with the Education Department. All it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state’s website, where we registered the ProPublica-Arkansas Times Curiosity Academy LLC as a business, listed ourselves as agents and officers, and paid a fee.
“We picked a name. We paid 45 bucks,” a ProPublica reporter noted after we submitted the application. With that, we had created a private school.
The secretary of state’s office approved our new business the same day. We even got a certificate.
The Arkansas Department of Education does not regulate private schools once they’re open, and no one from the state inspected the Arkansas Times newsroom, the location we chose for our school. As far as we know, nobody checked our backgrounds, either.
The official certificate acknowledging our schoolSecretary of State/State of Arkansas
Arkansas adopted a private school funding plan in 2023, and back then there were fewer than 100 private schools on record. With the state in the fourth year of its Education Freedom Accounts program, which provides vouchers that can be spent on private schools, there are now more than 220.
In addition, 143 microschools, which are a different category in Arkansas, were approved this year to accept tax dollars. That’s up from about 100 last school year.
Establishing the Curiosity Academy was so simple — and, frankly, a bit anticlimactic — that reporters then applied to become eligible to receive public funds. (Again, we applied with our names, work email addresses and a note that this was a journalistic exercise. We had no intention of actually ever taking any public money.)
We wanted to see how far our curiosity could take us.
Accessing public funds as a microschool in Arkansas is easier than it is for other types of private schools, even though there is no limit to the number of students one can enroll. Unlike private schools, we didn’t need to seek accreditation or show proof of financial solvency to accept state funding.
It took about 10 minutes to fill out the required information in early September. Other than our contact information, we had to upload just two documents — one detailing our proposed tuition and fees, and the other with our refund policy.
We said that — “should we open a school” — our tuition and fees per student would not exceed $7,208 per school year, the exact amount of Education Freedom Account money that each student in Arkansas is eligible for this year. We said tuition “would be collected only if education is delivered, and it would be the policy of the school to refund all tuition payments for educational services that are not provided.”
After much deliberation, we chose small state and national flags.Brian Chilson/Arkansas Times
When more than two weeks passed and we hadn’t heard back, we reached out to the state Education Department. An employee called back that afternoon and explained that the department had decided not to accept any more because the school year was underway.
But he didn’t reject us outright. He looked up our application and invited us to keep pursuing the public money. He said we still could apply to receive public money this school year, but as a vendor providing educational services such as tutoring. He also said we could apply as a microschool next year and even suggested a tweak to the language in our tuition policy should we decide to do that.
After we hung up, he emailed us the vendor application (which we will not pursue) and let us know the microschool application for next school year will open in the spring.
We asked the state Education Department whether it would be OK with us operating a publicly funded microschool. Clay, the spokesperson, said the agency’s role is to decide if schools meet state requirements. Microschool families, she said, “have the freedom to choose the educators and learning environments that best meet their children’s needs.”
Est. 2026
West Virginia: ProPublica-Mountain State Spotlight Curiosity Academy
Henry Culvyhouse and Smith Richards, in Mountain State Spotlight’s newsroom, write their application to found a private middle school in West Virginia.Laura Bilson for ProPublica
Hunched over a desk in the Mountain State Spotlight newsroom in Charleston, West Virginia, pen in hand, we scrawled out official notice of our new school in a spiral-bound notebook. We wrote that we would serve middle school students and listed our first day as TBD.
Leaving the crunchy, ragged edges on the paper, we stuffed our notice of intent into an envelope. We’d seen other new operators file similarly casual ones as they sought to register private schools in West Virginia.
Then we drove over to the state Education Department to deliver the request. Our group — two reporters, a photographer and a video journalist — went through security and, camera rolling, wound our way through the maze of the midcentury building. We got lost once, and our entourage received several perplexed glances from workers, but otherwise it was smooth sailing. The person we needed to deliver the letter to was out, but a friendly employee agreed to place it on his desk.
Dozens of new private and microschools have set up shop in the state in recent years, fueled by the roughly $5,400 the Hope Scholarship offers each student to pay tuition. New private schools all go through Dustin Lambert, a manager in the Office of Student Enrichment and Support at the West Virginia Department of Education.
We heard back from Lambert the next day. Our notice was received. (Hooray!) He said now we needed a letter from the fire marshal that our school building was safe for children. (Oh no.)
This was a problem. Our school would be housed in the Mountain State Spotlight newsroom, which had not been inspected as a school site. We didn’t want to usurp public resources to undergo a new inspection. It felt like the end of our Mountain State school experiment.
Smith Richards and Culvyhouse go to the Capitol to hand-deliver their application.Laura Bilson for ProPublica
But it wasn’t.
After we followed up to ask whether all schools, including virtual schools, need safety clearance to register with the state, Lambert told us that though all brick-and-mortar private schools do, we “may want to consider the microschool route.”
In that case, we later learned, the department wouldn’t be involved because state law doesn’t include any mechanism for oversight.
West Virginia defines microschools as schools that charge tuition and are started by one or more teachers. In practice, there’s no real difference between a microschool and private school — neither has a limit on enrollment. (Yes, a micro can be macro.) He forwarded us the rules for starting a microschool, which involve providing proof of a high school diploma, at least. We notified the local school district of our new microschool venture and sent a college transcript.
The Kanawha County school district, in turn, notified the state of the existence of a new microschool.
And with that — bypassing the building health and safety requirements — we established the ProPublica-Mountain State Spotlight Curiosity Academy. Officials at the Department of Education said they were aware that journalists were establishing a school. But they had to just watch us do so — they have no authority over the state’s microschools.
In an official statement, the department’s spokesperson said it “does not approve or deny the operation of microschools for any reason, including the qualifications of the owner/operator.”
By law, should we open our microschool — and we won’t — we could enroll an unlimited number of students.
Culvyhouse seals the envelope of our hand-delivered application.Laura Bilson for ProPublica
Pending
North Carolina: ProPublica-Assembly Academy
On Friday evenings, hundreds of people gather at Ponysaurus Brewing Co., a trendy spot in Durham, North Carolina, to savor its craft beers and cocktails, hardly the place you’d expect a school to open. But why not?
On a recent Tuesday morning, the brewery was quiet and closed to customers. Behind the bar, yeast busily converted sugars into alcohol inside giant stainless steel fermentation tanks. Two journalists settled onto barstools beneath signs for pilsners and cherry sours. Icy cold glasses of Tell the Truth, a light and lemony ale, sat before them on a high-top table beside a stenographer’s notebook and a laptop.
The brewery created the craft ale in partnership with The Assembly, which also is ProPublica’s journalistic partner in this private school endeavor, so it all felt very symbiotic. Ponysaurus’s owners had agreed to let us use their building and its fire and sanitation inspections, which are required to open a private school in the Tar Heel State.
ProPublica reporter Jennifer Berry Hawes and Carli Brosseau, right, a reporter for The Assembly, apply to open a private school at Ponysaurus Brewing Co. in Durham, North Carolina.Kate Medley for ProPublica
Reporters from The Assembly and ProPublica scanned a state of North Carolina website that details how to file a notice of intent to open a private school.
First, it explained the state’s statutory requirements for opening a private school, things like reporting the school’s name and address. We also would have to administer a standardized test in certain grades, if we were going to open an actual school, and maintain annual records about student attendance and immunizations.
Then, we watched a four-minute, 39-second video explaining how to file the required notice of intent.
From there it seemed simple. We created a login, then filled in the address of our school (Ponysaurus’s building), noted its owner and chief administrator (our reporters), and named it the ProPublica-Assembly Academy. We’d hoped to include the word Curiosity in the name, but the field in the form didn’t allow enough characters. In North Carolina, our curiosity would have to be implied.
We filled in a few more fields, including the grades we would serve (high schoolers), whether we would open a religious school (no) and the dates of our academic year.
Then we needed to upload fire and sanitation inspection reports. This step is what brought us here, to Ponysaurus, filling out the online notice to the tune of a hissing compressor that kept clean air moving through the brewing system.
“You will need to secure inspections for the building where the school will be housed. You will need a fire inspection from the local fire marshal and a health and sanitation inspection from the local health department,” the video said.
Just that morning, a City of Durham Fire Department inspector had visited the brewery and provided Ponysaurus with a fresh business occupancy inspection. We uploaded the new report, along with the brewery’s current food establishment inspection (on which it received a 99, an excellent score, we felt, for a school).
The screen flashed a confirmation. “Thank you. We have received your request to open a private school.” If approved, the page said, we should receive a school identification number in three to five business days.
We hoped to join the at least 169 other new private schools that have opened in North Carolina since the 2021-22 school year, which marked the start of a series of expansions to the state’s publicly funded vouchers for private school tuition.
If we wanted our school to tap the voucher money, we’d have to go through some additional steps such as getting criminal background checks. We weren’t doing that.
The proposed school has outdoor space for students.Kate Medley for ProPublica
The following day, we hit a snag. It came in a brief and garbled email. It said only: “Good morning and thank you for submitting a Notice of Intent to operate a private school. To complete the process we need to fire and sanitation inspections to” and then ended abruptly like that, no explanation or period. We emailed back, asking for clarity and noting we had already uploaded the inspection reports.
An official from the state Division of Non-Public Education then called. The school’s name needs to be on the inspection reports, she said, something we had not seen in any of our research. We also had not found any state statutes or rules that would preclude us — or anyone else — from opening a private school wherever we saw fit, be that a church or a brewery, as long as it passed “reasonable fire, health and safety inspections.”
In a follow-up call, she clarified that her division checks only to be sure the building has passed inspections specifically for a school. A spokesperson for the agency later added that state statute does not allow them to deny a private school application, but they won’t process an incomplete application — notably one without the proper inspections.
We hadn’t expected we would need a school-specific inspection at this point. The video explainer referred to inspections only generally, and the state’s written guidance indicated only that this would need to happen before occupancy.
Given we had no intention of actually opening a school, we had decided ahead of time that we wouldn’t consume any additional public resources — such as fire or health inspectors’ time — in our journalistic pursuit.
Perhaps Ponysaurus could pass the school-specific inspections. But the ethical red line would be our stop sign. Our curiosity would have to end in North Carolina.
Have you had trouble finding a school or using a voucher-style program? Do you have concerns about schools — public or private — in your area? Help us understand how families across the country are navigating their school options.
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