In 2021, Farryn Slaton-Barkley picked up her young son from daycare and noticed something was wrong. He kept repeating his teacher’s name, which was unusual for a child who was low verbal and usually only communicated his basic needs. Then she saw the marks on his hands.
An investigation by the state licensing agency confirmed abuse. Farryn, a veteran teacher with a PhD who has taught in public schools and as an assistant professor at both public and private universities, blamed the childcare system rather than just the worker. So she decided to channel her outrage in a way that would make lasting changes.
Using a grant from a local violence prevention initiative, Farryn trained women in Macon, Georgia, to open their own daycares, equipping them to handle children of all neurotypes. That was the seed of what would eventually grow into Rising Scholars Collective.
The organization’s work is wide-ranging, but the thread running through all of it is expanding academic options for neurodivergent children. Farryn describes Rising Scholars as “really an advocacy company” whose “main job is to help systems and educational organizations be more manageable, be more inclusive for children with disabilities.”
One of her key programs sends twice-exceptional middle schoolers—kids who are gifted but also have a disability—to college in the summer. She launched the first cohort in 2023, and this summer she’s opening it up to the broader community. The goal isn’t just academic acceleration. It’s making sure kids who can handle college-level coursework still get to be around peers their own age. “They might be able to do calculus, but you know, they might need help with writing,” Farryn explains. “They might still need to help tie their shoes. So just making sure they’re with their age group is important at this point in their development.”
Rising Scholars also helped organize the Middle Georgia School Choice Fair, which grew from eight vendors and roughly 200 attendees in its first year to 48 registered vendors and nearly 400 attendees in year two. It’s now formally partnering with the National School Choice Foundation, and Farryn is already planning for 2027.
Another big focus is growing the microschool ecosystem in an underserved community. Through what she calls the Microschool Builder Series, Farryn connects aspiring school founders to funding sources and national networks. One microschool has already launched out of her trainings. Another is being planned by a respite provider who wants to serve nonverbal, high-needs autistic children who are currently left with few alternatives to public placement. “You have parents take their kids out of institutions for that and homeschool them because it’s not safe,” Farryn says. “They’re not made to feel safe. Just like what happened to my son when he was younger, it wasn’t safe.”
She also works one-on-one with homeschool families, helping design individualized learning plans, connecting students to summer programs, and assisting families in applying for Georgia’s Promise Scholarship and Special Needs Scholarship. As an example, one of the families she serves includes a teenage girl with special needs who is interested in photography. Farryn helped enroll her in a college and career charter program so she could take film and trade classes with peers. “She’s just glowing,” Farryn says. “It is really about looking at the student, finding the needs, finding the programming, getting them enrolled, and then just seeing them flourish.”
Farryn is still in the classroom herself, teaching high school. “That informs my practice because I am a parent instructor, so I see things from a parent point of view,” she says. Her own son attended four different schools before landing in a microschool that met his needs. In her classroom, she encounters students who’ve masked their neurodivergence for years, picking up coping mechanisms and trauma along the way, with no diagnosis and no support. She uses April’s Autism Awareness Month as an entry point to talk about regulation, neurotypes, and brain differences, giving students language they can use when they eventually access health services on their own.
Rising Scholars Collective is not Farryn’s full-time job. “It is really a labor of love because it’s necessary. And our children, whether they do private, whether they do public, whether they do virtual, are just always at such risk,” she says. “It’s just like the same story over and over of how they’re underserved, not supported, you know, and, like what happened to my son, physically assaulted.” Rather than sit back and complain, she decided to build a stronger community and empower parents through advocacy, homeschool and microschool coaching, and school choice fairs.
“The irony is that I exist because the system’s broken,” she says. “My existence is based on the fact that there are schools and institutions that are not built with the children that I serve at the forefront. And so that’s what I’m working to improve.”