I have spent more than 20 years in education — teaching primary grades, coaching teachers, developing curriculum, and working as a school administrator. I’ve stood in a lot of classrooms and sat across from a lot of families. But the moment that ultimately shaped my path as a school founder wasn’t a professional milestone. It was a personal search.
When my son was younger, I went looking for the right school for him. I visited school after school, and what I found was that each one did something well in isolation. Some had strong character principles. Some had rigorous academics. Some invested deeply in helping children understand who they are and where they come from. But I could not find a single school that offered all three and offered them well. As an educator, I knew exactly what was missing. As a mother, I felt the gap just as clearly.
That experience stayed with me for years. It planted a seed that eventually became The Ferguson School in Decatur, Georgia — an intellectually, emotionally, and physically safe space where children can be fully themselves while being genuinely challenged to grow.
The families who find us have often been through something before they arrive at our door. They have sat in meetings where their child was described by a list of deficits rather than a list of strengths. They have watched their child shrink in an environment that didn’t see them. One mother came to me with a school report about her five-year-old son — a small, thin little boy — that used words like “aggressive,” “defiant,” and “threatening.” He had been suspended repeatedly. She had taken him home because she didn’t know where else to go. I asked her to bring him in for a shadow day and to stay nearby while he tried us out.
At the end of that day, she came to pick him up. I told her everything had gone well. Her son looked up and said he was ready to come back tomorrow. She asked, barely holding herself together, if he could. And then she cried. She told me she hadn’t believed anyone would want her child.
That is what the absence of school choice looks like. It looks like a mother who has been made to feel that her son is too broken to belong anywhere.
That young learner came to us not yet reading at grade level, his strengths in math and engineering completely unseen. With access to The Georgia Special Needs Scholarship, we gave him intensive phonics work. We gave him space to build and problem-solve. He is reading on grade level now and thriving. The behavioral labels from his old school have simply never materialized here.
Stories like his are why I do this work — and why I do more than run a school.
I believe that every child deserves a school that sees them whole — not just academically, but emotionally and culturally. School choice is what makes it possible for families to find that school, or for educators like me to build it. When parents have the freedom to choose, children stop being written off. They start being found.
That is the school I searched for as a mother. That is the school I am committed to building, and to helping others build, every single day.
Tiffany Blassingame is the co-founder of Black Microschools ATL, a Field Coordinator for the National Microschooling Center, and a Fellow with both the American Federation for Children Fellowship and the Arizona State University Prep Microschools. She serves as an EdChoice Parent Ambassador and on the Education Advisory Board for the National Center of Civil and Human Rights. Through the Microschool Teacher Academy, she works to share effective instructional strategies with teachers across the growing microschool movement. She has also presented at local, national, and international conferences on equitable identification and support for gifted and talented learners.
