Colleen Hroncich
Colleen Hroncich

With Idaho potentially on the verge of enacting its first school choice program, it seemed like the perfect time to profile a microschool in the Gem State.​As a special education teacher, Sarah Riesgo tried to find a school that worked for her sons who have special needs. She tried public and private, but “there was not a place where they were thriving,” she recalls. She decided to switch to homeschooling.
Several of her students and their parents asked where she was going because they wanted to follow her to her new school. When she explained she was going to homeschool, a few of the moms asked if she could homeschool their kids, too. She’d never thought of that, but she agreed to give it a try. She started with six or seven kids in her living room for the remainder of the year. But word spread, and some other families asked if their children could join. “We actually ended up renting a little one-room schoolhouse where I had fifteen kids last year,” Sarah explains. “And it kind of spread by word of mouth. We grew into an actual building this year, and now we have thirty kids, so we doubled from last year—without advertisement.” 

This is the first year Sarah’s microschool, which she named Victory Christian Enhanced Learning Center, is open to the public. The current enrollment is K‑8 with a mix of homeschoolers and kids from public and private schools. She uses a one-room schoolhouse approach with combined grades and an individualized approach to content. 
“If they’re closer in age, we’ll do, like in math, we’ll do introductions to new concepts together, and then we’ll kind of break off,” she says. “Really it’s not as much by grade, but it’s more the individual student. So if I have a third grader that’s struggling,  » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/friday-feature-victory-christian-enhanced-learning-center