After seeing her mom’s crazy schedule as a teacher, Jessica Slayback swore she’d never be one. She studied music at the University of Chicago, harboring visions of a concert piano career. “While there, I started to work in the public schools and started to have this working theory that if we just could get kids to do, like, theater and arts and music, they’d be so much happier and everything would change,” she recalls. “Kind of a young, idealistic view of the world.”
After college, she joined Teach for America and taught in Harlem for two years, and was completely baffled by the state of public education. It lit a fire under her. “If somebody’s not going to fix this, I have to do something,” she thought. She joined a charter school in Newark with a mission to get kids out of poverty and into great colleges. Jessica says it was completely different from the schools she taught at in New York. But the kids were still miserable. The school “sucked all the joy out of learning,” she explains.
At 22, Jessica had a wild idea. “I was like, these kids have got to get out of this place. They have to see that there’s life beyond Newark. They have to realize what can happen if you go somewhere else,” she says. So she took 12 high schoolers to New Zealand for two weeks, where they stayed on a marae and traveled the country. That trip changed her plans and shaped her view of what kids needed: “It was really this idea of, like, flourishing. Like kids need to be happy and they need to flourish above all else, and then they can learn.”
She eventually teamed up with a like-minded woman, and they began to dream about the learning environment they would create if they were starting at square one. “We would meet every week just to have this, like, idea session of what we really thought it could look like,” says Jessica. “And then I became pregnant with my first boy and was like, ‘No more thinking about it. We have to do it.’”
In 2009, they scraped together enough money to rent a small space in Santa Monica, California, and launched Outside the Box. They soon renamed it REALM—Redesigning Education and Living Meaningfully.
There’s something for everyone at REALM, which now serves about 150 students per semester across roughly 140 classes and employs 23 staff members. A typical day runs from 8:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., organized around each family’s completely personalized schedule. “There are about eight classes that run every hour,” Jessica explains. “Some kids come just a couple hours. Some kids come the full day. Some kids are in classes with like-aged peers. Some are not.”
Unsurprisingly, Jessica isn’t looking for conventional training in her teachers. There’s a marine biologist who also does ceramics, a fine artist who’s a math savant, and a professional “Magic: The Gathering” player who’s an incredible physics teacher. One instructor works with Netflix and PBS on climate science and teaches at REALM on the side. “When you find people who are passionate and want to be with kids and love what they’re doing, the rest of it’s just tweaks,” Jessica says. “It’s not a big deal.”
The REALM Excursions program sends older students on international trips—including Japan, Iceland, and Scotland—that they plan and fundraise for entirely on their own. Younger kids have their own mini Excursions, which are shorter domestic trips, such as to Alaska, Montana, and Washington, DC, planned by the students. The Excursions program was inspired by Jessica’s trip to New Zealand so many years ago.
REALM graduates are doing all sorts of things. One is working on nuclear fission at MIT. Another finished college at 19 and published her first book. Some start their own business or attend a four-year college. What does Jessica see as a common thread? “Flourishing,” she says. “Just really finding their own course, finding their own paths for who they are.”
In keeping with their original goal of completely changing education, the next chapter for REALM is sharing what they’ve built. “This REALM will only ever exist here,” Jessica says. “But the ideas and the things that we’ve created in the background now that really make it function and work beautifully, we want to just be able to give to others and say, ‘Hey, here’s everything that you can really use as your foundation. Now build what your community needs.’”