For more than 20 years, Tasha Ellis worked in a variety of roles within the education system, teaching K–8 in Atlanta public schools, adult literacy, even college classes. She was good at it. But something never quite fit.
“The school system didn’t allow me to be everything that I am,” she explains, “because I had to stay in a certain box, so to speak, or follow a script.”
A Montessori kid herself, she’d always believed in building the whole child and making learning personal. She was tutoring kids after school and thinking about starting a tutoring business. Then a friend sent her information about microschools. “She said, ‘This is your fit,’” Tasha recalls. “And I looked at it and I was like, ‘This is my fit.’”
Tasha took a leap of faith and left her job to create Legacy Learning Loft. There have been bumps along the way. She started with seven students, lost most of them, and had to rebuild from scratch; she converted her downstairs into a classroom so that she wouldn’t have to pay rent. Today she has three full-time students and four tutoring clients, including one adult. “I am growing. I’m eager to grow even more,” she says.
Legacy Learning Loft serves students in grades K–9. For her older student, Tasha starts the day with “culturally relevant social and emotional learning” using a program she purchased that includes Socratic discussions. “We’re able to talk about the things that we probably wouldn’t normally be able to talk about in a real school,” she says. Current events comes next, including conversations about what’s happening in the world and why it matters to them. Then comes math, ELA, and social studies, differentiated by student. Every week includes a hands-on STEM lesson for everyone.
For example, over the holidays students designed and built gingerbread houses. But first they had to choose an architectural style, measure materials, and work within a budget. “One student was like, ‘I don’t have enough money,’” Tasha explains. “I said, ‘Well, what do you need to do? Perhaps you can downsize.’ And he was like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ I was like, ‘This is life, kid.’”
The results with individual students have been impressive. One current 7th grader, a high-functioning student with autism, was previously enrolled at a $40,000-a-year private school in Atlanta. He came to Legacy Learning Loft reading at a 5th-grade level in literary skills but a 9th-grade level in vocabulary and informational text. “Our goal was to get him on 9th grade by the end of the school year,” Tasha says. When his diagnostic was readministered in December, he had jumped from 7th grade to 10th grade in both reading and math. He was so excited he asked to call his parents right away. “His mom said, ‘Oh my gosh,’ she said, ‘this is our fit.’ And he said, ‘Mom, this is my fit.’ And he said, ‘I didn’t know I was capable of this,’” Tasha recalls. “Those kind of things warm my heart.”
She’s also working with students who arrived as non-readers and are now reading—still building comprehension but making progress. “Just being able to work with kids who need to be seen and heard and valued and know that they belong has been an absolute blessing,” she says.
Scheduling at Legacy Learning Loft is flexible. Tasha has one full-time student and two who come part-time, spending their other days at an outdoor learning school they’ve attended since age three. For families who can’t make a full switch, tutoring remains an option.
The biggest hurdle, Tasha says, isn’t the teaching—it’s helping families understand what a microschool is. When you say personalized instruction, she says a lot of people think the child is just sitting in isolation all day and not socializing at all. One student’s friends told him he wasn’t in a “real school.” His response stuck with her. “He said, ‘It is a real school because I’m getting real results.’”
Despite the challenges, Tasha says that “being able to create my own educational space has been an absolute dream.” For anyone considering starting a microschool, she advises, “Understand your why. And let that define what you’re doing, because you’re creating something that is small but mighty.”