Why Classroom Everywhere

I thought I knew what school was.

I had been a student. A good one, even. I came up through a well-funded, blue ribbon school district in the suburbs. I knew the rhythms — the bells, the desks in rows, the textbooks, the tests. I thought I understood the system because I had survived it, maybe even thrived in it.

Then I became a teacher.

I went through an alternative licensure program, which means I was dropped into a classroom on day one while I was still completing my coursework. No student teaching. No gentle on-ramp. Just thirty kids, a curriculum guide, and a steep, unforgiving learning curve. My first classroom was in a Title 1 urban school — a bilingual classroom — worlds away from the suburb I had grown up in. And watching the sausage get made was something I was not prepared for.

The rigid schedule. The exit tickets — universal, applied to every student, assessed on a single problem, brought to weekly data team meetings as though one number could tell you anything meaningful about a child. The mandate to be on page 42 on this specific date so you were keeping pace with the other classrooms. The apology delivered without irony: sorry, the curriculum was built in English and there aren’t enough resources for your bilingual classroom. Figure it out.

No time to slow down. No time for the unnecessary stuff.

I remember feeling so much pressure to stay on pace that I turned our ten-minute daily snack time into a structured speaking and listening curriculum built around the fruits we were eating. Not a minute to waste. Not a minute to just be.

And yet — that same year, my students learned about education as a human right. About children in other parts of the world who cannot continue their schooling because there is simply no money for books, for uniforms, for the basic infrastructure of learning. We researched. We presented. We organized a fundraiser. We sent one child in Vietnam to school for a year.

My students — poor, disadvantaged, some of them literal refugees — did that work. They raised that money. They made that happen.

And I got reprimanded for going off-book.

That’s the thing that has never made sense to me. Common Core, No Child Left Behind — these frameworks were supposed to be a safety net. A guarantee that no child would fall below a certain threshold. I understand that impulse. I do. But somewhere along the way, the safety net became a ceiling. The floor became the destination. And in our determination to make sure no one fell behind, we started holding back a whole lot of amazingness.

There are so many creative, flexible, thrifty educators out there — people who can pull community connections and build real, meaningful experiences that extend far beyond any curriculum guide. And the system, in its rigidity, tells them to close their classroom doors and get back on page 42.

I worked within that system for eight years. Various roles. Various grade levels. I learned how it works from the inside. I internalized the scope and sequence of standards the way a musician learns scales — drilling them until they became instinct, until I could feel in my bones where a student was supposed to be and what came next.

But learning your scales is not the same as learning to play music.

When I started at the microschool, that’s where I learned to compose.

My first year, I had a classroom spanning 2nd through 5th grade. That is a wide, humbling range for someone who had only ever taught one grade at a time. I was up in the wee hours, lit by the glow of my laptop, writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting the flow of the day. I spent hours calling and emailing community partners, setting up field work and guest speakers. I trained my students for independence — which took enormous time at the beginning of the year, but paid off in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

The beauty of multi-year grouping is that once a student is normalized to the system, they carry it with them for three years. When a new student steps into an established ecosystem, the culture does half the work for you.

At a certain point, I stopped feeling like I was trying to keep my head above water. I had learned to surf the waves.

I still fell. I still got water up my nose — which, for the record, I hate. But I had learned that if you have a solid foundation in what needs to be learned and who your students are, you can relax a little. If the vibes aren’t right for a long math block, you can table it and come back. If a more engaging tangent surfaces — one that is still educationally alive and relevant — you can follow it. You learn to read the room. To present the right challenge at the right moment. To intentionally pair experiences. To intentionally pair students with each other. To step off the stage and let them teach one another.

I was writing my own music. And it was hard, and it was the most rewarding thing I had ever done professionally. Coming through that hard — finding my systems, building my own confidence — is what made me less afraid to do this next thing.

And then there was my daughter.

I taught 5th graders for years. I know the social dynamics that shift in that second half of the year, especially for girls. I know what executive function deficits look like in a classroom. I know what happens when a teacher is playing behavioral whack-a-mole all day, when a new conceptual curriculum gets mandated mid-stride to teachers who have never taught that way before, when the SPED and SEL teams are stretched past their limits.

I want to be clear: I do not blame the schools, the teachers, the administrators. The culture of public education in this country right now is beyond any of their individual faults. The system is broken, and the people inside it are doing their best to keep their heads above water. I know that feeling from the inside. I have lived it.

But I also know what it looks like when a child is disappearing inside a system that was never built for her. I have spent years searching for the right educational setting for my own kids — trying just about everything, watching, adjusting, advocating. I am a teacher. I know how to read a classroom. And what I was reading told me that fine was not what was happening. Not even close.

My daughter was floundering. And I was done waiting for someone else to fix it.

And so was I — in a different system, but the same story. Held inside structures that went against who we were destined to be. How we were born to be.

I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

I am tired of waiting for the change to come from above.

It is not coming. Not fast enough. Not in the form that is needed.

The educational model designed to prepare a population for Henry Ford’s assembly line is obsolete in our modern world. We have modernized transportation, agriculture, communication — we have transformed nearly every system we depend on — and yet we are still asking children to sit in rows and move in lockstep toward a standardized finish line. Teachers have felt the misalignment for years. Parents have felt it. Kids are living it.

I am in a unique position — education, experience, and urgency converging at once. And I believe that if the change is not coming from above, it has to come from us. From the ground up. Community by community, classroom by classroom, kid by kid.

That is what Classroom Everywhere is. It is a belief that the future of this country is community-based. That smaller, more flexible systems — ones that can adapt to a changing world and the specific needs of the specific humans inside them — are not a compromise. They are the answer.

And I do not want to do this alone in a silo.

When I was up at 3am rewriting that schedule for my 2nd-5th grade classroom, I wished desperately for a lighthouse. Not someone with all the answers — I knew that no one else’s school would look exactly like mine, nor should it. Every community is different. Every group of students is different. That’s the whole point. But I wanted someone who had been through it to tell me I wasn’t crazy. That it was possible. That the hard was worth it.

I couldn’t find that person. So I kept going alone, hopeful and capable and a little isolated, documenting the journey and wishing someone out there would see it.

I want to be that lighthouse.

For the burned out teacher who has never seen another way but knows, somewhere deep, that there has to be one. For the parent searching for years for the right fit for a kid who doesn’t quite slot into any of the available options. For the brave, creative, thrifty, bold educator who is willing to at least try a new paradigm — even when it’s scary, even when the resources are scarce, even when they’re doing it mostly alone.

My goal is to lower the barrier. To share what I’ve learned. To build the tools and the model and the community that I wish had existed when I needed it most.

Because here is what I know now, looking back at that woman up at 3am, lit by her laptop, rewriting the schedule one more time:

It works out. Stick with it. One day you will step back and look at this amazing little microcosm community — and it will be everything you deep down knew it could be. The sense of accomplishment of knowing that you are powerful enough to create a real, meaningful change — if only for the twelve students in front of you.

Those twelve are worth it.

Classroom Everywhere is Sara’s educational framework for community-rooted, student-centered learning. She is currently building a middle school pod in the Denver area, launching January 2027. If this resonates with you — as a parent, an educator, or someone who just knows the system needs to change — get on the list.