Federal government spending is soaring and debt will soon reach record highs compared to the size of the economy. Rising spending and debt are undermining growth and may push the nation into a financial crisis.

As the federal government’s size has expanded, the scope of its activities has also grown. The government subsidizes farming, health care, school lunches, broadband, rural utilities, energy, rental housing, aviation, passenger rail, public broadcasting, chip manufacturing, job training, foreign aid, education, urban transit, space exploration, and hundreds of other activities.

For decades, the government has published an official list of all its grant or subsidy programs for the states, businesses, nonprofits, and individuals. The list used to be called the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance but is now called Assistance Listings. The list is a rough indicator of the steadily expanding scope of federal interventions.

The chart shows that there are 2,418 federal grant or subsidy programs in 2023, more than double the number in 1990. Each new subsidy program requires higher taxes or more federal borrowing. Each subsidy generates a bureaucracy, spawns lobby groups, and encourages more special interests to demand handouts.

The rise in size and scope of federal subsidies means that Americans are losing their independence. State and local governments, businesses, nonprofits, and individuals that become hooked on subsidies become tools of the federal government. They have less incentive to work and innovate, and they shy away from criticizing government policies.

Let’s all celebrate July 4, but remember that the path to freedom and prosperity is to cut the size and scope of the federal government.

____________________________

Data Notes: Counts for 2020 and 2023 are from July listings under grantsgov here. Previous years were counts based on hardcopy and electronic versions of the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance. The new Assistance Listings keeps the same CFDA numbers. The counts should be considered only a rough measure of federal subsidies since what constitutes one program and one grant is rather loose.

An example of a new grant program is CFDA 20.939 for safe streets enacted in 2021. You can get a sense of the bureaucracy in this one new subsidy program reading the materials here and here. There is no reason for this new federal intervention, as the states themselves are in favor of safe streets and have their own revenue sources.

Next term, the Supreme Court will decide two cases raising questions unique to the social media age. Many public officeholders have social media accounts that are not formally run by the government, but which the officeholders nonetheless use to discuss public affairs. In Port Huron, Michigan, the city manager used a Facebook account to discuss COVID-19 emergency measures and other city policies. In Poway, California, two school board members used Facebook and Twitter accounts to discuss school district issues. When these officeholders were criticized by constituents on their social media accounts, they “blocked” some of those users, which prevented the constituents from reading or commenting on the officeholders’ posts.

The officeholders in both cases were sued by their constituents for these social‐​media blockings, and both cases raise a novel question. While private citizens are free to ignore or engage with the speech of others as they please, the government has special obligations under the First Amendment. Government officials may not block access to government forums (say, a town meeting held at City Hall) on the basis of a citizen’s viewpoints. When the officeholders in these cases blocked other users from accessing social‐​media accounts that discussed government affairs, were the officeholders acting as private citizens or as agents of the government? In other words, were the blockings “state action” subject to First Amendment limits?

While the disputes in both cases are between the officeholders and the blocked constituents, there are also third parties involved whose First Amendment interests should not be overlooked: the social media platforms themselves. To address this concern, Cato has joined NetChoice, Chamber of Progress, and the Computer & Communications Industry Association to file identical amicus briefs supporting neither party in both cases. No matter which way the Court rules on the question at hand, it should be careful to avoid mistakenly suggesting that the private platforms themselves can become state actors.

In our briefs, we make three key points. First, as private platforms, social media sites have their own First Amendment right to decide who uses their services and on what terms. The Supreme Court has held that a private newspaper has a First Amendment right to reject an editorial. Miami Herald v. Tornillo (1974). Social media sites similarly have the right to reject comments and accounts, a right that they make explicit in their terms of service.

Second, private platforms do not become “state actors” simply by virtue of hosting government officials. A private newspaper does not become a state actor simply by virtue of running an editorial written by the president, and a social media site similarly does not become a state actor by virtue of hosting an account operated by the president. Social media sites provide tools like “blocking” to all users. If a government official misuses such a tool and violates the First Amendment, the liability lies solely with the official, not the platform that provided that neutral tool.

Third and finally, public officials may not commandeer the editorial controls of social media platforms to indirectly censor user speech they could not regulate directly. The Supreme Court has held that indirect government censorship, known as “jawboning,” can violate the First Amendment when the government impermissibly pressures private actors. Bantam Books v. Sullivan (1963). But crucially, the remedy once again lies in suing the government actors, not the private platform that has been pressured. The Court should make clear that if there is any indication of jawboning in this or any other case, that does not transform a social media site into a government actor or a proper defendant.

Like any tool of communication, social media can be used for the good, the bad, and the illegal. Where to draw the line in these cases is a difficult question. But no matter what, the Court should remember that tools of communication are distinct from their users. The Court’s decisions should not blur the lines between private platforms and their public users.

Last Thursday, the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, finding that it was not plausibly authorized by statute and that the State of Missouri had standing to challenge the program via a state-created loan-servicing entity that would lose tens of millions of dollars in fees if the program took effect. This post will explain why Cato filed its own, now-moot challenge to the loan forgiveness program, followed by some thoughts on the increasingly pernicious role of “avoidance doctrines” such as standing, ripeness, and mootness in public-policy litigation.

The great miltitary strategist Sun Tzu famously said that the acme of skill in war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. For government lawyers, the acme of skill is to shield unlawful policies from judicial review by persuading courts that there is some procedural bar against challenging them. Last week, the Supreme Court rebuffed the Biden administration’s attempt to employ that precise stratagem to forestall a judicial determination as to whether the president has the power to forgive nearly half-a-trillion dollars worth of student loans without express congressional authorization. Surprising no one, the Court’s answer to the substantive question was a resounding “no.” But constructing a legal challenge that would ensure the judiciary reached the merits of that question was a dicey proposition. Why? One word: standing.

In brief, standing is a court-created rule that says only certain people can challenge a given policy in court. To have standing, the would-be plaintiff must have suffered a concrete injury that was caused by the policy at issue and can be fixed (or “redressed”) by the courts. Thus, for example, I do not have standing to challenge the Justice Department’s sweetheart plea deal with Hunter Biden, both because I’ve not been personally injured by it (mere outrage is insufficient) and because there’s really nothing the courts can do about DOJ’s propensity for coddling VIPs.

Like so many judge-made legal rules, however, standing is both amorphous and prone to abuse. It’s amorphous because it lacks clear doctrinal parameters and can be easily enlarged or constricted as a matter of judicial whim. And of course that makes it prone to abuse, since judges can simply declare that a given plaintiff either does or does not have standing depending on whether they do or don’t want to reach the merits of the case at hand. To be clear, not all standing inquiries represent such an exercise in procedural roulette, but an increasing number of them do—particularly as poliymakers become more conscious of their ability to defeat judicial review through strategic legerdemain.

Thus, the key question in the loan-forgiveness case was not so much the legality of the program itself, but instead whether the Biden administration and its lawyers could persuade the judiciary that the executive branch can expend nearly half-a-trillion dollars in unappropriated funds without causing a sufficiently concrete injury to confer standing on any individual or entity affected by that program. As we learned last Thursday, the answer is no. But boy, was it close.

Without delving too much deeper into federal standing doctrine, the basic problem here was that the Supreme Court has generally rejected the concept of “taxpayer standing”—that is, the idea that any given person who pays taxes can sue the government simply because it is (arguably) spending that revenue unlawfully. Accordingly, when President Biden announced his intent to forgive student loans without express congressional authorization, there was a scramble among people and groups who opposed that policy to identify a concrete and individualized theory of standing that might pass muster with a judiciary that tends to be more comfortable rubber-stamping challenged government programs than striking them down—especially when they involve things like the proper scope of federal power, economic regulations, property rights, or tax policy.

As noted, Missouri and a handful of other states led with the theory that a blanket student loan forgiveness policy would deprive them of fees generated by their respective loan-servicing entities. Another suit was filed by two college graduates from Texas who challenged the Department of Education’s failure to follow proper administrative procedures, which they said might have resulted in better debt-forgiveness terms for each of them.

At the time, it was unclear whether either of those standing arguments would prove viable, and additional complaints were filed by other groups, each asserting a different theory of standing. This included a lawsuit brought on Cato’s behalf by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which alleged that Biden’s blanket loan forgiveness program would prejudice non-profit employers like Cato, for whom Congress had created a more targeted policy called the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program that was designed to give non-profits a recruiting edge by providing loan-forgiveness to their employees after ten years. Whether legitimate or illegitimate from a policy perspective, the advantage conferred on charitable employers by that program would be eliminated by across-the-board debt forgiveness, which represents a cognizable injury that is redressable by the courts—et voila: standing.

As it turns out, the Supreme Court held unanimously that the two Texans lacked standing to challenge Biden’s loan forgivness program while ruling 6–3 that the states (or at least one of them, which is all that mattered) did have standing. Bottom line, it was a close call, and it was fortunate that Cato and others were waiting in the wings with their own unique—and potentially more persuasive—standing theories. But those other cases, including Cato’s, are now moot in light of the Court’s decision to find standing in the states’ challenge and strike down Biden’s loan forgiveness scheme.

In retrospect, the half-dozen lawsuits filed against that program may seem like overkill. But as a colleague at my first law firm used to say of a judge in one of his cases, “You never know on any given day what’s going to get his attention: Will it be the red rubber ball, the shiny metal object, or the baby rattle? So you bring ‘em all.” And so it is when seeking to overcome the slew of avoidance doctrines routinely deployed in public-policy litigation by government lawyers like ink from a fleeing squid. If standing, ripeness, and mootness can fairly be compared to a game of craps—and they can—then it makes sense for both sides to get as many chips on the table as possible.

If that sounds like hyperbole, consider the following examples, which represent merely the barest hint of the jaw-dropping bad faith with which avoidance doctrines are asserted by government lawyers and employed by judges to make potentially troublesome cases go away:

• Cato v. SEC (DC Cir. 2022). This case involved a First Amendment challenge to the SEC’s policy of imposing a lifetime gag order on defendants in civil enforcement actions as a condition of settlement. Cato sued on behalf of an author who wrote a memoir about being caught up in that process that it was unlawful for him to publish due to the gag order. As a would-be publisher of that work, Cato asserted the well-established theory of third-party standing, but the DC Circuit held that the “redressability” requirement for standing was not met on the premise that all of the challenged gag orders had been incorporated into judicially enforceable consent decress around the country that judges in DC were powerless to disturb. Besides being incorrect on the law, that holding was based on a demonstrably false factual premise: Contrary to the DC Circuit’s completely baseless assertion—that was supported nowhere in the pleadings or the record because it was false—all gag orders (including the very one at issue in this case) had not been incorporated into judicially enforceable consent decrees—a fact that Cato pointed out repeatedly throughout the litigation and again in its petition for rehearing, which the DC Circuit ignored.
• Parker v. Heller (DC Cir. 2007). Another example of standing gamesmanship from the DC Circuit arose in the Second Amendment challenge to the District of Columbia’s gun laws brought on behalf of six DC residents by me, former Cato board chair Bob Levy, and Alan Gura. In blatant and acknowledged disregard for Supreme Court precedent, the DC Circuit invoked its special law of standing for guns and held that five of the six plaintiffs lacked standing because they had not yet violated the law and received a specific threat of prosecution—actions that are never required in any other setting to establish standing. Only Dick Heller was ultimately found to have standing because he had made an entirely futile attempt to register a handgun in DC and was denied—an act that the DC Circuit risibly (but correctly, as a matter of circuit precedent) held supplied an alternative basis for standing.
• Alvarez v. Smith (2009) and NY State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. City of New York (2020). These are both examples of “strategic case mooting,” a common practice whereby government lawyers will vigorously defend an unconstitutional policy in the lower courts and then moot the case if it looks like the challengers might win on appeal and thereby establish favorable precedent. Alvarez was a challenge to Illinois’ unconstitutional civil forfeiture procedure, which the state defended below but then mooted when the case got to the Supreme Court by returning the plaintiffs’ unlawfully seized vehicles. NY State Rifle & Pistol involved a challenge to a New York City ordinance that severly constrained people’s ability to move a lawfully registered pistol from one location to another (e.g., from an apartment in Manhattan to a cabin in upstate New York), which the City defended vigorously in the lower courts but then repealed immediately after the Supreme Court granted certiorari, in a transparent (and ultimately successful) effort to derail the case. So much for all the assertions the government made in the lower courts about the supposed importance of the law, the momentous safety issues involved, etc.—all of which turned out to be cynical, disingenuous prattling.

As suggested above, the list could go on almost indefinitely. But the takeaway is this: When it comes to the willingness of government lawyers and judges (a wildly disproportionate number of whom were themselves courtroom advocates for government before taking the bench) to employ standing, ripeness, mootness, and other “avoidance doctrines” in order to derail challenges to plausible allegations of unlawful government action, there is no bottom.

And that’s why Cato joined the fray over President Biden’s unlawful student loan forgiveness scheme—not because there was ever any doubt about the merits; but instead to help make it as difficult as possible for the judiciary to sweep that unlawful power grab under the rug with the handy-dandy standing-broom. 

This article appeared on SubStack on July 3, 2023.

Last week Maine legalized the sale—but not the purchase—of prostitution services, becoming the first state to enact such a law. (Nevada allows legal prostitution in counties with fewer than 700,000 residents; Rhode Island had no law against indoor prostitution between 1980 and 2009.)

Maine’s policy is a step in the right direction, but as with laws that legalize drug possession but not production or sale, removing criminal penalties from only one side of the market is a minor step that can be worse than no legalization at all.

Under partial legalization, the prostitution market remains underground, with all the attendant negatives: violence, corruption, and poor “quality control,” meaning greater transmission of sexually transmitted diseases.

De-criminalizing only the supply side improves the well-being of prostitutes. The risk, however, is that when other evils of underground markets continue, some observers assert that legalization has failed. This happens repeatedly in debates over decriminalized drug markets.

The ideal policy is therefore full legalization of prostitution that involves consenting adults. Child prostitution and trafficking are different stories, since both involve coercion (presumptively for children, as with statutory rape laws, or explicitly for children and adults when traffickers use deception and force). The most effective way to eliminate these components of the market is full legalization of adult, voluntary transactions.

Here we go again. Another “obituary” for libertarianism. While Salon Magazine declares that we all live in a “libertarian dystopia,” and a new brand of big-government conservatives promise to free the Republican party and American government from their libertarian captivity, Barton Swaim declares in the Wall Street Journal that a new book “works as an obituary” for libertarianism. That’s not a characterization that I think the authors—Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi—would accept of their book, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism.

Swaim notes that the book surveys many different kinds of self-styled libertarians over the past two centuries, and that the authors lay out six “markers” that libertarians share: property rights, individualism, free markets, skepticism of authority, negative liberties, and a belief that people are best left to order themselves spontaneously. Not a bad list, significantly overlapping with the list of seven key libertarian ideas that I laid out in the first chapter of my own book, The Libertarian Mind.

He goes on to argue, following the authors, “In the 21st century, the movement in the U.S. has consisted in an assortment of competing, often disputatious intellectual cadres: anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, paleo-libertarians (right-wing), ‘liberaltarians’ (left-wing) and many others.” Somehow he leaves out actual libertarians, such as those who populate the Cato Institute, Reason magazine, the Objectivist world, and much of the Libertarian Party. Indeed, a few lines later he cites the “diversity” of “the priestess of capitalism Ayn Rand, the politician Rand Paul and the billionaire philanthropist Charles Koch”—none of whom would fall into any of the esoteric categories that he suggests make up modern libertarianism and in fact belong to actual libertarianism or its penumbras.

The whole review is ahistorical. Swaim never mentions classical liberalism, the revolutionary movement that challenged monarchs, autocrats, mercantilism, caste society, and established churches beginning in the 18th century. Liberalism soon swept the United States and Western Europe and ushered in what economic historian Deirdre McCloskey calls the “Great Enrichment,” the unprecedented rise in living standards that has made us moderns some 3,000 percent richer than our ancestors of 1800. The ideas of the classical liberals, including John Locke, Adam Smith, and the American Founders, are those that animate modern libertarianism: equal rights, constitutional government, free markets, tolerance, the rule of law. Zwolinski and Tomasi say that “what sets libertarians apart is the absolutism and systematicity” with which we advocate those ideas. Well, yes, after 200 years of historical observation and philosophical and economic debate, many of us do believe that a firmer adherence to liberal/​libertarian ideas would serve society well. We observe that the closer a society comes to consistent tolerance, free markets, and the rule of law, the more it will achieve widespread peace, prosperity, and freedom.

Swaim insists that libertarians do not engage “with ultimate questions—questions about the good life, morality, religious meaning, human purpose and so on.” He’s wrong about that. Adam Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments. F. A. Hayek stressed the importance of morals and tradition. Ayn Rand set out a fairly strict code of personal ethics. Thomas Szasz’s work challenged the reductionists and behaviorists with a commitment to the old ideas of good and bad, right and wrong, and responsibility for one’s choices. Charles Murray emphasizes the value and indeed the necessity of community and responsibility. Libertarian philosophers of virtue ethics find the case for limited government to be based on the search for the good life. Swaim would be on more solid ground to say that libertarianism does not presume to tell individuals what to believe and how to live. Separation of church and state and all that. As I wrote in a letter to the Journal (not yet published), Swaim refers to the “studiously amoral philosophy of libertarianism.” A popular summary of libertarianism, “don’t hit other people, don’t take their stuff, and keep your promises,” is just the basic morality that allows human beings to live together in peace.

As for his claim that libertarianism is dead, that this book is an obituary, I refer Swaim again to all the people who complain that we’re living in some sort of libertarian world. Libertarians often feel depressed; they believe the world is on “the road to serfdom.” But in fact the world is far freer in this century than ever before in history. Free markets and free trade, an end to slavery and caste societies, representative government, and the rule of law now govern the Western world and much of the rest. Most of the Cato Institute’s website comprises complaints about the malfeasance of the U.S. government. But in the bigger picture, libertarians have had much success. In the roughly 50 years since I started thinking about politics, one could point to such successes as:

• the end of conscription in the United States
• social, economic, and political equality for women
• dramatically lower marginal tax rates
• freer trade
• deregulation of major industries such as airlines, trucking, communication, and finance
• the almost total demise of communism
• and the consequent discrediting of socialism and central planning
• the reorientation of antitrust policy to a consumer welfare standard
• expanded First Amendment protections
• expanded Second Amendment protections
• the progress of gay rights and gay marriage
• growing opportunities for school choice
• a slow erosion of the war on drugs

I could go on. None of these are total victories. No ideology achieves all of its sweeping vision, at least not without a military conquest of the government and the ability to rule by decree—and those experiments are nothing to emulate. In various parts of the world bad ideas are back—socialism, protectionism, ethnic nationalism, anti-Semitism, even industrial policy. The libertarian challenge is to join with other liberals—Reaganite conservatives, free-speech liberals, people who are “fiscally conservative and socially liberal”—to push back against these bad resurgent ideas. But this record of accomplishment is no obituary.

Today the Supreme Court rejected President Biden’s massive debt-forgiveness plan, holding that it was not authorized by the statute the administration invoked. The decision is a welcome reaffirmation of the principle that when the president wants to enact a policy, he must convince Congress to do so, rather than hunt for old statutory language that cannot bear the weight of a massive policy change.

To understand the government’s argument, it is necessary to understand the law that the government invoked. In 2003, Congress enacted the HEROES Act (“HEROES” stands for Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students). As implied by its name and timing, the law was enacted as a reaction to the Iraq War. Several of the floor statements from members of Congress reveal that a primary motivation for the Act was to ensure that military members could have their student loan payments deferred while serving their country.

But last year, the Biden Administration attempted to use the HEROES Act to achieve a policy goal that was far different, and far more sweeping, than anything the law had been used for in the past. The administration announced that after a nearly three‐​year pause on federal student loan payments, certain borrowers meeting an income cutoff would receive $10,000 to $20,000 in debt forgiveness on their principal student loan balance. While the total cost to taxpayers from this program was uncertain, the Congressional Budget Office estimated it to be around $400 billion.

To enact this massive debt‐​forgiveness plan, the administration relied on a section of the HEROES Act that gives the Secretary of Education authority, in certain circumstances, to “waive or modify” provisions of law applicable to federal student loans. The Secretary may do so “as may be necessary to ensure that…recipients of student financial assistance” who are affected by war or national emergency “are not placed in a worse position financially in relation to that financial assistance because of their status as affected individuals.”

The administration argued that this section grants the Secretary the authority to forgive billions of dollars in student loans across millions of borrowers. It argued that some borrowers will default on their student loans once payments finally resume after the multi‐​year pandemic pause. And it further argued that forgiving some (or all) of millions of borrowers’ principal balances would lower their monthly payments and thus lower their overall risk of default, ensuring that their risk of default is no worse than it was before the pandemic.

But the Court today rejected that statutory argument. In an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for six justices, the Court held that the administration did not “modify” or “waive” provisions of federal law at all—it instead wrote an entirely new law. The Court noted that the administration’s plan “specifies particular sums to be forgiven and income-based eligibility requirements. The addition of these new and substantially different provisions cannot be said to be a ‘waiver’ of the old in any meaningful sense.”

The Court thus held that the authority to “waive or modify” statutory provisions is limited to eliminating or modestly altering various distinct requirements. It is not an authority to “draft a new section of the Education Act from scratch by ‘waiving’ provisions root and branch and then filling the empty space with radically new text.” Although another section of the HEROES Act mentions that there may sometimes be “terms and conditions to be applied in lieu of” waived or modified statutory text, the Court held that “the Secretary’s ability to add new terms ‘in lieu of’ the old is limited to his authority to ‘modify’ existing law.” And that authority in turn is limited to modest changes, in line with the dictionary definition of “modify” as “to change moderately or in minor fashion.”

Although the Court rested its decision on an analysis of the plain text “waive or modify” alone, the Court also noted that if the interpretive question were at all close, the Major Questions Doctrine would resolve it the same way. The Court stressed that under “the Government’s reading of the HEROES Act, the Secretary would enjoy virtually unlimited power to rewrite the Education Act.” Under the Major Questions Doctrine, congressional authorization for such power is not lightly assumed. The Court held that the statute lacks the clear statement necessary to clear that hurdle.

In a concurrence, Justice Amy Coney Barrett explained her view that the Major Questions Doctrine is not in tension with normal principles of textualism, but rather in harmony with the principle that text must be interpreted in proper context. Justice Barrett offered several examples from everyday life of how permission is interpreted based on context, such as how “an instruction to ‘pick up dessert’ is not permission to buy a four-tier wedding cake.” Cato’s amicus brief began with several similar examples making the same point: statutes are directives made by elected representatives on behalf of the people that must be interpreted faithfully and in context, not self-servingly.

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote for three justices and argued that the Court should not have even reached the merits. The majority found that Missouri could sue because the debt-forgiveness program injured the loan servicing corporation MOHELA, an “instrumentality” of the state of Missouri created by state law. But the dissent argued that since MOHELA’s finances are separate from the state’s finances and since MOHELA has the authority to sue on its own behalf, the state could not pick up MOHELA’s mantle as a hook to obtain standing.

Although Justice Kagan would not have reached the merits, she also made clear that she disagreed with the majority on the merits. Justice Kagan stressed that the HEROES Act is only triggered during emergencies, which places limits on executive authority even if the term “waive or modify” is read broadly. But if and when an emergency occurs, Justice Kagan argued that Congress expected the executive branch to take actions in proportion to the emergency. She argued that the only reason the HEROES Act had never before been used for such a consequential program is because since 2003, the country had never faced as serious an emergency as the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Based on the Court’s reasoning, it seems clear that there is now no avenue for this or a future administration to use the HEROES Act to enact a loan-forgiveness program, since any such program must involve not just waiving and modifying statutory provisions but also establishing new guidelines for eligibility and the amount forgiven. Whether the Biden Administration will attempt to use a different statute entirely to enact a loan-forgiveness program, such as the Higher Education Act, remains to be seen.

LeDonna Griffin spent nearly 30 years in Omaha public schools as a teacher and administrator. So she’s seen it all—the good, the bad, and the ugly. She knew the challenges in the system, and she was pretty sure she could help families create better options for their kids.

“One of the powerful things I often saw was that children were in their safest place—I mean emotionally, physically, ability to learn new information—in the home,” says LeDonna. “With COVID happening and parents feeling very flustered in marginalized communities and looking for alternatives, Leaders to Legends came into existence out of a need. It was a need first. And then it all naturally took place.”

Leaders to Legends started out as a consulting company assisting families with various education issues. The homeschool co-op came about from parents who were frustrated and told LeDonna “I can no longer have my child experiencing a lack of success.” She started with one family asking for homeschool support and it grew from there. “We began in the public library at no fee and started to meet with multiple families. Within three months’ time, we outgrew the library and are now housed in a building that we call the Parent Resource Center,” she recalls.

The co-op currently meets three days a week, Tuesday through Thursday, year round. The families have a lot of control over the co-op—they vote on which curriculum to follow in each subject as well as different aspects of how the co-op is run. The school day often starts with affirmations, where they talk about why they attend Leaders to Legends—to grow to be their best self and make the world a better place. “Our whole model is based around ‘how can I make the world a better place?’” LeDonna explains. “We have a whole mission and vision of building a healthy community that goes out and builds other healthy communities. So it just becomes a natural thing and doesn’t take work—it’s just ‘this is who we are.’ And that is the goal of Leaders to Legends.”

The co-op also covers traditional academic subjects. For history, they typically use some type of unit study. “We just completed a George Washington Carver unit study,” LeDonna says. “And then we had an open house where parents were invited, and they explained to the parents everything they learned—although parents are learning right along with them and doing some of the curriculum at home. It was a great way for them to practice public speaking.” Each day there’s a different special class, too: martial arts is on Tuesday, Wednesday is music class, and sewing is on Thursday. For music class, the students got to pick which instruments they’re learning—half chose piano and half chose drums.

In this past school year, there were seven families with 17 children participating. LeDonna is hosting homeschool information sessions over the summer and has had quite a bit of interest. She expects to have 15 to 20 families enrolled by August. “The tides are definitely turning where parents are saying my child deserves a quality education and this is how I’m going to get them there,” she says.

When asked what advice she would have for anyone who is considering starting a homeschool co-op, LeDonna doesn’t hesitate. “The nature of homeschool itself is parent driven, right? My advice would be to allow the parents to drive this thing. Parents have a lot to say; it’s unfortunate that not often enough are they asked. Coming from the public school sector, not often enough are they asked. If they’re given that space, you’d be amazed what they can do and put together and invest in providing a quality education for their child.”