What We See is a conversation series across Indie Education. Microschools, homeschool families, and hybrid programs talking about what they're actually doing, how they know it's working, and what the metrics miss.

In this episode, Tomis talks with Jill Haskins, founder of Kainos Microschool in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Jill is a former public school teacher who said she'd never homeschool, then did; said she'd never pursue accreditation, then joined the first Middle States pilot for microschools. Kainos started as 11 kids in her living room in January 2025 and grew to 25 students, a staff of four, and a waitlist of 28 by that fall, operating out of a former vape shop in a strip mall.

She describes quiet, focused mornings driven by planner checklists her students love; why her team whites out the grade levels on assessment reports before kids ever see them; the "side quests" her students named themselves; and what changed for a seventh grader whose previous school had decided to stop teaching him to read.

Sheri Grace has a PhD in early childhood education and spent years teaching teachers before she went looking for the thing her textbooks had left out. She found forest school, got a little mad nobody had told her about it sooner, and started Piedmont Forest School in a Winston-Salem park where, as she tells it, no one had ever actually played.

Five years on it runs five days a week, and this fall they are adding an Agile Learning Center to continue serving kids that grow up in their program. She walks through what a morning in the woods actually looks like, why a kid with a saw is steadier than you'd expect, and what four kids learned building a fort that nobody assigned.

In this episode I talk with Denise Lever, a former wildland firefighter who started homeschooling while her family moved nine times in thirteen years, and who now runs a network of eleven microschools in an Arizona town of six thousand people.

We get into her three-tier model of autonomous founders sharing one building, the GPS meetings where guide, parent, and student sit down together to design a learning plan, and her four conditions for how kids actually develop: relationships, autonomy, respect, and competencies. Denise also tells the story of her daughter's senior year on an off-grid ranch in Mexico, which led to an archeology interest, a state college scholarship, and a useful argument about the difference between being educated and being schooled.