“I accidentally started a school,” says Siri Fiske, founder of Mysa Microschool.
Siri has spent the majority of her adult life in education, primarily in urban schools in Los Angeles. She first got interested in education when her children attended a public school co‐op in California. She began designing curriculum for a public school there, focusing on units of study and ways to make learning fun. She then worked for independent schools and spent seven years working at a school in Korea.
Siri eventually moved to Washington, D.C. where she started designing her ideal school based on her experience designing curriculum as well as working with her own five children, who each had different learning needs. She considered what research says about how kids learn and what is missing in the education landscape.
“My initial plan was for a middle school,” she says. “There are great elementary schools and high schools, but there aren’t a lot of great middle schools.” She created a middle school model that she intended to be a school within a school—an existing public school would be able to implement her model as a subset of the regular middle school. As she was working on her design, she set up a non‐profit and learned grant writing.
Siri’s grant writing was more successful than she expected it to be, and she landed enough funding to start her own school: Mysa School, a modern version of the one‐room school house. According to the Mysa website, “Our students learn in a cooperative, multi‐age environment; this is a collaborative, interdisciplinary school community where students chart their learning pathways, in close consultation with faculty. Students are empowered to choose how knowledge is constructed and how to demonstrate understanding. This results in a truly student‐centered learning experience, where students are gifted with open and flexible physical spaces, a number of technological tools, and individualized curricula.”
Mysa uses a hybrid model that combines hands‐on, project‐based learning with online lessons, programs, and resources from around the world. Each week, students receive a customized menu of work that has been crafted with their personal interests and learning needs in mind. Students manage their projects, assignments, and deliverables with guidance from teachers as they work to master the content.
According to Siri, “In this day and age, with what we know about how people learn, and the resources we have instantly available, schools need to more flexibly adapt the ways that they teach each child to that particular child’s learning style. I believe that the Mysa model of education, with its personalized learning plans, honors the uniqueness of each student and is a highly effective way of not only teaching, but of lighting a fire of curiosity within each student.”
Siri gets frequent requests to start other schools—including from parents whose children had a chance to spend a day at Mysa. In 2021, she worked with a group of parents to open a campus in Vermont. She says it’s been a good opportunity to see if what her program that has been successful for a diverse group of children in urban DC will also flourish in rural Vermont. So far, it seems to be working.
One area where Mysa differs from many other microschools is that part of its mission is to help improve public schools. Siri uses national standards as benchmarks but finds unique ways to help children reach those benchmarks. She’s even piloting a software program to help schools and parents track student mastery using various benchmarks separate from grade levels. If you’re interested in participating in the pilot program, you can connect with her through the Mysa website.
Siri says, “The Mysa model not only prepares students for college but it honors the needs of the student in the moment, as adolescents and young adults, acknowledging that they have the rest of their lives to be grown up, but only one childhood.”
Mysa Microschool is an exciting example of what education can look like when we think beyond the conventional understanding of “school.”
