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Alternative school teachers tout new approaches, but oversight concerns linger • South Dakota Searchlight [1]

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Date: 2025-01-12

Sara VanDerVliet didn’t have a minute to spare.

The agricultural education teacher was responsible for 150 students split between seven classrooms in the Tri-Valley School District. She saw each student for an hour a day, with 20 other students in each class.

As a Future Farmers of America adviser, she also managed up to 100 students with nearly 30 competitions throughout the year jammed between her responsibilities as a teacher, farm wife and a mother of four.

Rising Alternatives This is the fourth story in a five-part series about alternative instruction in South Dakota. Further stories examine the reasons families choose alternative options, accountability concerns, growing alternatives for Indigenous education, and the ways some public schools are working with alternative-instruction families.

She felt guilty. She didn’t have the time to do her job well, she thought. After teaching for 17 years in the public school, she felt like she was failing her students and herself.

“It got to the point where it was sucking the life out of me, and my own kids were put on the backburner,” VanDerVliet recalled.

So she quit.

VanDerVliet is one of thousands of teachers across the country to leave their jobs since the pandemic, which has added to understaffing problems at some public schools, including in South Dakota. Reasons for leaving other than retirement include too many responsibilities, too little pay and concerns about well-being, based on a 2022 McKinsey and Company survey.

But VanDerVliet didn’t leave the profession. She started a hybrid school called Buffalo Christian Homeschool Academy. The school combines in-person teaching in a classroom setting twice a week and at-home learning the rest of the week.

She incorporates her faith into her work, teaches a smaller number of students, and threads agriculture — the lifeblood of her rural southeastern South Dakota students — throughout all grade levels, rather than reserving it for high school.

For decades, alternative instruction was synonymous with homeschooling. In recent years, it’s changed to include pods, co-ops, microschools, hybrid schools and online schools. For a growing number of South Dakota students, alternative instruction exists on a spectrum between school and home, in person and online, with teachers ranging from parents to paid professionals.

Alternative instruction has nearly tripled in South Dakota over the last decade from 3,933 students in 2014 to 11,489 — now making up about 7% of school-age children in the state.

The rise is one of the highest in the nation, and Gov. Kristi Noem is proposing to support it with $4 million for education savings accounts of $3,000 per student, which could be used to pay for a portion of private school tuition or curriculum for alternative instruction.

Noem’s proposed funding could be used for tuition to Buffalo Christian Homeschool Academy. VanDerVliet’s alternative school is one of over a dozen in South Dakota — many started within the last four years by former educators.

As alternative instruction grows and shifts toward online and microschool models, critics have grown concerned about quality and accountability, because some alternative schools lack accreditation and have uncertified teachers.

Buffalo Christian, which is unaccredited, opened in the fall of 2022. Families from within an hour and a half’s drive of Humboldt bring their children to the two-story farmhouse twice a week, trusting VanDerVliet and her teaching partner with their children’s education.

VanDerVliet plans to keep her teaching certification up to date, especially so her students can participate in Future Farmers of America as a chapter. Her teaching partner was an elementary school teacher for 13 years, but did not keep her certification.

The first year, 22 students enrolled at Buffalo Christian. This school year, there are 31.

“If people have the heart to teach, no matter what form, they’ll teach,” VanDerVliet said. “And they’ll teach well.”

Wide variance in alternative schools

Hybrid schools like Buffalo Christian are one of several schooling options for alternative instruction students. Schools like VanDerVliet’s are private schools unaccredited by the state. The schools aren’t accountable to state standards, testing or oversight like public or state-recognized private schools, such as some religious, colony or tribal schools. The state Department of Education has virtually no oversight of unaccredited alternative schools due to deregulation passed by lawmakers and Gov. Noem in 2021.

Alternative schools vary by how they’re operated: some meet five days a week, others less; some teach all subjects while others leave some for parental instruction; and some are religious while others are not. Ultimately, the structure depends on the founder.

At Acton Academy in Sioux Falls, the school doesn’t use classrooms, it has “studios.” Students don’t learn from teachers, they learn from “guides.” And it’s not a school year, it’s a “hero’s journey.”

Students lead their parent-teacher conferences and present their learning — through projects and debate — to their parents after each unit instead of taking a test.

The school encourages students to take ownership of themselves and their education before they dive heavily into academics, said Aaron Johnson, administrator of the Sioux Falls location. There are over 300 Acton Academy locations internationally.

Johnson has no background in education but some of his “guides” do.

“As a society, we’ve got it wrong on both ends,” Johnson said. “You have a 5-year-old raised in academics when they need to understand themselves and peer relationships and do that through play, freedom and being an actual child — not ‘here’s your set of academic achievements as a 5-year-old.’”

Lack of regulation concerns critics

Samantha Field, government relations director for the national nonprofit Coalition for Responsible Home Education, said she has concerns about the rise in hybrid and microschools. She sees too much trust among the alternative instruction community in other adults and instructors. For example, not all learning communities require background checks to teach children.

While the onus is largely on the parents to ensure instructors are safe, it should also be a responsibility of the state, Field said. She was homeschooled from 1993 through 2005 in New Mexico, Florida and Iceland. She said her co-op instructors were not able to teach some subjects adequately.

“Generally, it’s accepted that the state has a duty and responsibility to make sure its students are protected, even if the parent is not being responsible,” Field said. “That’s why teachers have background checks.”

Some alternative schools are accredited through nongovernmental programs, such as Lakota Waldorf School on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The school is accredited through the Association for Waldorf Schools of North America. Acton Academy in Sioux Falls is accredited by the International Association of Learner Driven Schools.

Accreditation isn’t required for alternative schools and programs in South Dakota. But it can mean more funding to the school, since it ensures the school meets expectations and standards. Accreditation can also inform parents of what the standards are at the school.

South Dakota law allows alternative instructors to teach up to 22 children at a time. Certification and background checks aren’t required. Many staff members teaching alongside former educators aren’t certified.

State accreditation would require certified staff. Most alternative school founders interviewed for this article said they do not want to be accredited.

They said accreditation requirements can counter alternative teaching methods, especially if the school does not want to comply with state-mandated content standards, classroom hours or testing. Complying with those requirements could make alternative schools no different than public schools, said Mary Jo Fairhead, founder of a microschool in Martin, which would defeat the purpose of starting an alternative school.

Jason Watson, superintendent of Sunshine Bible Academy in Miller, has a different view. The school is accredited by the state and the Association of Christian Schools International. Watson said few textbooks used at the academy would be found in a public school, and testing is not a driving force for the school. Most of the state requirements are “common sense” and what the school would be doing anyway, Watson said.

The “only specific benefit” to state accreditation for the private school, Watson said, is to receive tax-credit scholarships for students. The state created the private-school scholarship program in 2016 by giving tax credits to insurance companies for their scholarship donations. Last year, the Legislature raised the program’s cap to $5 million. About 30 of Sunshine Bible Academy’s 77 students receive the scholarships.

Rob Monson, executive director of School Administrators of South Dakota, said the benefit of accreditation is that it provides expectations and standards for participating schools to show they are “viable.”

Monson also advocates for stronger oversight of alternative instruction. He’d like to see the state return to “some sort of assessment” to check student progress and authorize school districts to reenroll students into an accredited program, either public or private, if they do not meet standards.

‘We basically have an IEP for every child’

Fairhead said becoming state-accredited could undermine her mission at Onward Learning in Martin.

Her state certification as a teacher, principal and superintendent is still valid, and she plans to keep it up to date just in case the state changes its regulations and requires certification. But her other teachers at the school aren’t certified, which she said isn’t a concern for her.

While earning her undergraduate degree in education, she tutored students in Spearfish and came to believe public schools aren’t serving some students who are “falling through the cracks.” That belief grew while she served as a principal in Batesland, part of the Oglala Lakota County School District.

Schools identified as “improvement schools” by the state and federal government test their students more heavily than other school districts. Oglala Lakota schools start testing in kindergarten. Field trips or class parties are used to incentivize students to perform better on tests, Fairhead said. Students who don’t perform don’t participate.

Fairhead didn’t like that approach.

“We’ve gone too far with it. We’re using it in a way that has major consequences,” she said. “At the end of the day, kids are humans and not a percentage on a test.”

At Onward Learning, a birth through eighth-grade child care provider, preschool and microschool, Fairhead gives her students a placement test in math and reading when they enroll in school and tests them sparingly afterward. The microschool is based out of Fairhead’s former house, which her family lived in before moving to a new home just outside of Martin.

“We basically have an IEP for every child based on their needs and interests and strengths,” Fairhead said, referring to individualized education programs.

What happens when alternative school children apply for college? Typically, a transcript and passing score on a standardized exam, such as the ACT, are required to apply to colleges and universities. In South Dakota, transcripts of a student’s educational career can be personally submitted by alternative instruction students rather than an official transcript from a school district, according to the South Dakota Board of Regents. Northern and Black Hills state universities don’t require potential students to submit exam scores. The headcount of public university students with an alternative instruction background grew from 248 systemwide in 2015 to 377 this fall. The number of alternative instruction high school dual enrollment students — taking a college class while still in high school — increased from 24 in 2015 to 71 this school year. The average ACT score for first-year South Dakota public university students who self-identified as coming from an alternative instruction background stands at 26, according to state data for 2024 enrollment. The average score for South Dakota public school students is nearly 23. Retention among first-time alternative and public school students is comparable, with around 84% of students returning the next school year.

Fairhead conducts unit tests for math to help her understand if students need to revisit skills or concepts. She does not report test scores to the state or another entity.

Tests in English, writing, reading and science are mostly observation or essay based, Fairhead said. Students present a project or portfolio for history rather than take a test.

“A multiple choice test, anyone can guess and get right,” Fairhead said, “but if you’re presenting a project on the Civil War and you’ve done your research, you can create an awesome presentation showing all the things you’ve learned and explain it in your own words and voice. That’s a deeper level of learning than filling in the right circle.”

She has 35 children, split among four teachers. Twelve children sit on the waiting list. About 90% of Fairhead’s students are enrolled in the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

VanDerVliet’s Buffalo Christian Homeschool Academy is also growing. She’s planning to increase to 40 students and add another teacher to the program.

She still works as an FFA adviser for her students, since it’s an integral part of agricultural education in the state. But she has 12 advisees instead of the hundred or so some other advisers handle.

She’s “still crazy busy,” but she has more time to teach her students and raise her children, to work on the family farm with her husband and create lesson plans, and to care for herself and those around her.

Another FFA adviser chatted with her at a competition last year. Before leaving to run after his students, he made sure she knew: She doesn’t look as stressed.

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[1] Url: https://southdakotasearchlight.com/2025/01/12/alternative-school-microschool-hybrid-teachers-new-approaches-certification-accreditation-concerns-linger/

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