Friday Feature: Mysa Microschool

Colleen Hroncich“I accidentally started a school, ” says Siri Fiske, founder of Mysa Microschool.Siri has spent the majority of her adult life in education, primarily in urban schools in Los Angeles. She first got interested in education when her children attended a public school co ‐​op in California. She began designing curriculum for a public school there, focusing on units of study and ways to make learning fun. She then worked for independent schools and spent seven years working at a school in Korea.Siri eventually moved to Washington, D.C. where she started designing her ideal school based on her experience designing curriculum as well as working with her own five children, who each had different learning needs. She considered what research says about how kids learn and what is missing in the education landscape.“My initial plan was for a middle school, ” she says. “There are great elementary schools and high schools, but there aren’t a lot of great middle schools. ” She created a middle school model that she intended to be a school within a school —an existing public school would be able to implement her model as a subset of the regular middle school. As she was working on her design, she set up a non ‐​profit and learned grant writing.Siri ’s grant writing was more successful than she expected it to be, and she landed enough funding to start her own school: Mysa School, a modern ver...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs