Almost Anyone Can Start a Private School in West Virginia. We Put This to the Test.
We’re reporters, not teachers. We have no business starting a private school.
But our reporting has shown the relative ease with which people — some with questionable backgrounds — have founded their own schools. They’ve popped up in barns and on farms, in strip malls between an antique shop and an ax-throwing business.
We also learned that in West Virginia, the state’s Education Department has no authority at all over a specific type of private school: microschools. A spokesperson told us the department “does not approve or deny the operation of microschools for any reason.”
So we put this to the test. Over the last few months, we partnered with ProPublica to establish our very own school: the ProPublica-Mountain State Spotlight Curiosity Academy.
Spoiler alert: It took only a scrap of notebook paper and some emails.