No Chickens and No Eggs!

It is fitting that over the Easter break I realized that starting a school is a chicken and egg conundrum: which comes first? And what happens when you have neither chickens nor eggs?

For a new school, it seems to me that the chicken is the building and the eggs are the children: one cannot happen without the other. And so we are rather stuck at this point! How big of a building do we need? Where should the building be? Where will we find most students? How many students will enroll? Will a parent or community member be able to help us find a building? There are so many questions, and many of the answers seem to depend on what the answers to the other questions are!

One way around this issue is to initially start up as "homeschool supplementation" or even just a plain "homeschool". I'm no expert on legal jargon, but in reading the Washington Homeschool WACs, it seems to me that this is totally legitimate. I could find no limit on the size of a homeschool group. Parents must provide "access" to all of the same subject matter their child would receive in a public or private school, AND while yearly testing is recommended, it can not be required. This seems to me to be the perfect solution for Freedom School's first year (or two?). In fact, this is exactly how Clearwater School in Bothell initially started up: they operated as a homeschool for several years before officially becoming a "real" school.

Some pros of starting up as a homeschool: our building can be any building (like a basement apartment or holiday lake house) approved by or even offered by the parents of our enrolled students; we can travel more freely to field trips; parents can come and go as they wish; we can start with a small group; tuition will be very low as there will be few overhead costs; we will have no deadlines for OSPI paperwork and building safety and fire inspections; and, parents will hopefully donate materials as needed. I'm sure there are several other benefits of starting up this way.

The cons I can think of are: if we have a huge first-year student body, it will be difficult to find a building; the "unofficial" nature of Freedom School may encourage some students/families to set their own agenda, coming and going as they please.

Of course, I'm only one person, and not too experienced in starting a new school. I also tend to be overly optimistic. Yet, in talking this over with one of my team members, it seemed to us that starting as a homeschool seems to be almost unavoidable.... What do you think?