Why I Built a Page on Our Website to Tell Some Parents We're Not Right for Them

Why I Built a Page on Our Website to Tell Parents We Might Not Be Right for Them

I get a lot of inquiries from parents who are done with public school. They’ve hit a wall. Their kid is miserable, or they’re watching their kid slowly become someone they don’t recognize, and they’ve finally decided that something has to change. So they start a-googling. We pop up. They come visit.

Of course we want them to sign up.

The problem is this.

When school has spent years teaching you that education looks like school — like compulsion, like control, like a teacher at the front of a room deciding what everyone will learn today — natural learning is a lot to take in. You visit a place like the Spokane Learning Co-op and you don’t see an imposed structure, so you assume there’s no structure at all. No structure means no learning. So you go home.

Insert me weeping.

The thing that breaks my heart even more than the parents leaving, though, is the kids.

They arrive looking sour and sullen and defeated. Years of being managed will do that to you. They hover near mom, not quite making eye contact with anyone, and ask, in a voice that sounds like they’ve already given up: “What am I supposed to do?”

It’s the saddest question in the world. It means school has done its job so thoroughly that this child no longer trusts themselves to know what they want. They’ve outsourced their inner compass to adults who didn’t have their best interests at heart. Now, standing in a field full of kids who are laughing and building and figuring things out, they can’t find it.

This is the beginning of their deschooling phase. It is a real thing and it takes time. There is no shortcut.

What Deschooling Actually Is

Deschooling is the period between leaving conventional school and being ready for something like self-directed education. It looks like aimlessness. It looks like boredom. It looks like a kid who is apparently doing nothing for weeks on end and a parent who is quietly panicking.

This is what recovery looks like.

A child who has spent years in a system that told them their curiosity was irrelevant, their body was an inconvenience, and the right answer was more important than their own thinking is a child who needs time to remember who they are. You can’t skip this part. You can’t speed it up, no matter how much you want to get to the good stuff. You just have to wait, and trust, and resist the urge to fill every hour with something productive.

The worst thing you can do during the deschooling phase is replicate school at home. I know it’s tempting. The structure feels safe. What you’re actually doing, though, is expanding the amount of time your child spends in the thing that broke them. And because now you’re doing it to them the problem gets bigger.

The families who arrive at the Co-op during the deschooling phase are not ready for us. We are not what they need right now. What they need is time. Quiet, unscheduled, no-one-is-watching-you time. They need to be bored enough to remember what they actually like. They need to discover, slowly and in their own time, that they are still in there.

Come back when that’s happened. We’ll be here.

Freedom Heals

I have taught everything from PreK to university, in five different countries. I have sat in more classrooms than I can count, on multiple continents, watching children be managed, and seeing what that does to them, year after year.

When kids who have been through the deschooling phase come to the Co-op, something happens that I have watched over and over and never get tired of seeing. They arrive uncertain. A little stiff. Still waiting, somewhere in their nervous system, for someone to tell them they’re doing it wrong.

Slowly, they stop waiting.

They start digging, or building, or talking to a kid who is four years younger than them like that’s completely normal (it is), or inventing a game with rules so complex it takes twenty minutes to explain. They start laughing. They start advocating for themselves in our Rules Meetings in ways that make me want to cry, the good kind. They start becoming, in front of my eyes, exactly who they were before school got to them.

This is not magic. Freedom heals. Getting to have the specific, daily experience of being trusted is healing. It’s healing to wake up and know what you want to do actually matters. It’s healing to spend three hours on ten wild acres with other kids who are building something together, where no one is going to tell you to sit down, no one is going to grade you, and the only rules are the ones you made together with the consent of the other kids.

This is what happens when you stop managing a child and start trusting them.

The Families Who Are Ready

They’re not hard to spot.

They’ve already been unschooling for a while, or they came to it from the beginning and never looked back. They’ve read Peter Gray, or John Holt, or John Taylor Gatto, and they felt like someone had finally said out loud what they’d always known. They love being outside. They camp. They’ve been to Between the Rivers or Saskatoon Circle or another ancestral skills camp, and they’ve thought: what if childhood felt like this every week?

We’re a magnet for moms starving for community. We’re not just another park meetup where you see different faces every time and you have to be on alert because it’s a public park. We’re a real, recurring, rooted community where people know each other’s names and show up week after week and look out for each other’s kids, and for each other, too.

These families register the same day they visit. Sometimes during the visit. Their kids don’t want to leave.

So I Rebuilt the Website

I’ve been running the Spokane Learning Co-op since September 2024, and I’ve lost count of how many versions of our website we’ve been through. Each one has been an attempt to help the just-right families find us.

This time, I did something I’ve never seen another school or co-op do. I built a page called Who Thrives Here. It describes, honestly and specifically, the families who tend to fall in love with us the moment they arrive. It also describes the families who might not be ready yet, and why, and what to do instead.

It mentions our camp toilet. Upfront. The families who love us most are the ones who don’t care about that.

If you’re in the Spokane area and you’ve been looking for this kind of community for you and your kids, come see us. Scheduling a visit is now as simple as filling out a short form.

Who Thrives Here →

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