North Carolina nonprofit launches effort to expand private schools in rural areas

The lack of rural private schools has long been used as an argument against expanding school choice programs, but a North Carolina nonprofit is looking to change that.

Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina has launched EduBuilder, a program designed to help launch new private schools across the state, especially in areas that don’t have them. 

The initiative is aimed at assisting “edupreneurs” in starting and expanding schools. It will provide founders of microschools, hybrid schools and other nontraditional learning environments with resources, strategic guidance and advocacy, the group said in a release. 

Such schools have proliferated in the past five years, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Mike Long, president of PEFNC, said the initiative “represents a bold next step for advancing educational freedom” in North Carolina, with the potential to add 1,000 seats across various schools in the next year. 

“As demand for school choice grows, families need more private school seats so that scholarships translate into real opportunities,” Long said. 

North Carolina’s school choice program lifted all income restrictions this year, prompting applications to more than double to nearly 80,000. Many schools are filling up quickly, creating high demand for seats. 

Renee Griffith, founder and executive director of Cornerstone Christian Academy, will run EduBuilder, telling the North State Journal the “learning center model” at her school works well in rural areas. 

“Instead of having a classroom, a learning center has a combination of grades and students are taught individually rather than in a group,” she said. “And so, it works well in small areas where maybe the facility is small and it would not logistically be possible to put a classroom for each grade.” 

The concept is similar to one-room schoolhouses, which served as the bedrock of American education for more than a century, particularly in small communities. Griffith said those schools produced many of the nation’s greatest leaders. 

She is working with churches and organizations to identify potential sites and has already found about 1,000 seats that could be created in the next 12 months, the Journal reported. 

Other states, including Indiana, are working to launch microschools in rural areas, offering school choice to all residents.

A national program, SchoolBox, helps prospective school founders launch all kinds of Christians schools, including in urban, suburban and rural settings, as well as traditional, classical and hybrid models. SchoolBox is a program of the Herzog Foundation, which publishes the Lion.