What We See is a conversation series across Indie Education. Microschools, homeschool families, and hybrid programs talking about what they're actually doing, how they know it's working, and what the metrics miss.

Justine Wilson spent seventeen years in conventional schools, teaching and then leading buildings across Ohio, Colorado, Egypt, Brazil, and Qatar, before founding Curious & Kind Education in Sarasota, Florida. Now in its third year, Curious & Kind is a forest school that homeschool families choose one to three days a week, on a campus with a creek, a mud kitchen, and a well-loved rope swing.

Justine walks through a typical morning, from the stump circle where the whole group co-plans the day to the offerings kids drift between, and she describes what she watches kids build in themselves that a report card was never designed to hold.

One of the lightest moments is about a hamburger, and why one student swore it was the best cookout she had ever been to.

What We See is a conversation series across Indie Education. Microschools, homeschool families, and hybrid programs talking about what they're actually doing, how they know it's working, and what the metrics miss.

In this episode, Tomis talks with Jill Haskins, founder of Kainos Microschool in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Jill is a former public school teacher who said she'd never homeschool, then did; said she'd never pursue accreditation, then joined the first Middle States pilot for microschools. Kainos started as 11 kids in her living room in January 2025 and grew to 25 students, a staff of four, and a waitlist of 28 by that fall, operating out of a former vape shop in a strip mall.

She describes quiet, focused mornings driven by planner checklists her students love; why her team whites out the grade levels on assessment reports before kids ever see them; the "side quests" her students named themselves; and what changed for a seventh grader whose previous school had decided to stop teaching him to read.

Sheri Grace has a PhD in early childhood education and spent years teaching teachers before she went looking for the thing her textbooks had left out. She found forest school, got a little mad nobody had told her about it sooner, and started Piedmont Forest School in a Winston-Salem park where, as she tells it, no one had ever actually played.

Five years on it runs five days a week, and this fall they are adding an Agile Learning Center to continue serving kids that grow up in their program. She walks through what a morning in the woods actually looks like, why a kid with a saw is steadier than you'd expect, and what four kids learned building a fort that nobody assigned.