New group aims to clear path for microschools, church-based schools as choice movement grows

As school choice surges past 1.5 million students nationwide, a key problem is emerging: how to create enough seats for families seeking alternatives to public schools.

Schools for America, a new organization that launched publicly this week, says it has an answer. The group aims to tackle zoning laws and regulations that restrict options ranging from microschools to homeschool co-ops and church-based schools.

Jane McEnaney, the organization’s executive director, told The Lion her group is focused on removing those barriers to ensure that school choice succeeds.

“I think the biggest issue the next few years is going to be solving and/or preventing a supply-demand mismatch,” McEnaney said in an interview.

“If we don’t right-size the regulations that are preventing people from opening schools quickly that are accessible and affordable, with or without an education scholarship through an ESA or tax credit scholarship, it’s going to be the first thing that our opponents use against us.”

Building on Florida’s success

McEnaney, who previously worked for State Policy Network, said she developed a national perspective on the school choice movement, which has expanded to 35 states.

Florida stands out both for its high participation and for a new law taking effect July 1 that reduces regulatory burdens on small schools.

The legislation, signed last week by Gov. Ron DeSantis, provides alternative fire code compliance options for schools with 150 students or fewer, updates occupancy categories and streamlines approval timelines. Instead of taking one to two years, McEnaney said new schools in Florida could launch in as little as three to five months, with significantly lower startup costs. That should help reduce the number of unused school choice scholarships.

“Florida had 41,000 unused scholarships in 2025, not because families weren’t interested in an alternative but because there weren’t enough available seats,” she said. “The year before it was 90,000.

“I read those numbers and I was like, ‘What are choice opponents going to say?’ They’re going to say, ‘Oh, look, these families had options and they didn’t use them. Guess they didn’t want choice.’ And once that narrative takes hold, it’s really hard to combat.”

Going national

The organization is working with Primer, a microschool network operating in several states, to expand Florida-style reforms nationwide. 

“When I founded Primer, I never would have imagined the number of nights and weekends I’d spend staring at zoning maps and local building code,” Primer CEO Ryan Delk said in a video announcing Schools for America. “I learned the hard way that the number one bottleneck for us was going to be outdated regulation – regulation that was designed for an era when every school looked the same. That era is over.”

In a LinkedIn post, McEnaney likened the regulations to “requiring a food cart to install the same ventilation system as a commercial kitchen before it can sell a single hot dog. That would be absurd, right? Yet that’s what most states ask of enterprising educators who want to start a small school.”

Through advocacy, the group aims to loosen restrictions that “keep exceptional educators from delivering what parents across the country want: personalized small schools that meet their child’s needs,” Delk said, and allow schools to open “without a small army of lobbyists and lawyers.”

Schools for America is nonpartisan and not religious, but McEnaney said it will work with churches and faith-based groups. Many congregations hold weekly services but face different regulations when trying to host a school – something the organization wants to change.

“We say to lawmakers, ‘If you can have Sunday school, why can’t you have Monday school?’” McEnaney said. “It’s so beneficial to the church community to be able to use this space.”

She added that churches hosting schools is a passive form of evangelization, since it brings people through the doors who might not otherwise have come.

‘Red, blue and purple states’

The group plans to begin work in Texas and Alabama, where school choice programs are expanding rapidly. 

Texas saw strong demand for its Education Freedom Accounts this year, with 274,000 applications for about 90,000 scholarships. If lawmakers expand funding to add more scholarships, McEnaney warned, the state could face the same supply constraints seen in Florida.

“Before school choice passed, the Texas Private Schools Association said the current marketplace could only absorb about 70,000 students,” she said. “That may be fine for year one, but the minute the Legislature increases the appropriation so that the program can serve more kids, they’re going to be hit with that same Florida problem where there’s not enough supply caught up to the demand.”

Other states under consideration include Tennessee, which passed school choice last year, and Pennsylvania, a politically-divided state that has several smaller, targeted programs.  

Although red states form the bulk of the school choice universe, McEnaney said regulatory reform is needed in “blue states and purple states, in every state,” regardless of whether they already have private school choice programs.

Schools for America is structured as a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization and is funded by private donations.

While other groups help launch schools, including The Lion’s publisher, the Herzog Foundation, with its SchoolBox and HF Homeschool, McEnaney said this effort focuses specifically on removing legal and regulatory barriers.

“There was no organization nationally that was exclusively dedicated to removing these regulatory hurdles,” she said. “This is something the school choice movement needed, and now that organization exists.”

Supporters on social media praised the effort, arguing current regulations disproportionately hinder smaller, more flexible schools.

Bobby Fijan, co-founder of The American Housing Corporation, called it “truly one of the most important missions in the U.S. We need to build more, smaller schools to make neighborhoods and cities better for families,” he wrote. 

Joe Liemandt, a tech baron who is helping expand AI-based Alpha School nationally, agreed.

“At Alpha School, we see it daily: the hardest part of opening a great school isn’t the model or the families, it’s the regulations,” he wrote on X. “@delk and @jemcenaney just built the org that will fix it: Schools for America. Worth your support.”