A decade ago, Tiffany Thenor left the public school classroom in tears.

For seven years, she had been teaching second and third grade at Philip O'Brien Elementary School, a Title I public school serving a high percentage of low-income students in Polk County, Florida. Teaching had been Thenor's lifelong dream. It was all she ever wanted to do, but as a new mother and a classroom teacher frustrated by the constraints of traditional schooling, she felt increasingly certain that something needed to change.

"I believe in public education," Thenor told me in a recent interview. "I just don't always believe in the way it's done."

So in 2016, she and a fellow teacher at the school, Jessica Zivkovich, left to launch something different: WonderHere, a play-based, nature-centered learning program in Lakeland, Florida, that began with just seven homeschooled students. Now a state-approved private school, WonderHere serves 120 full-time students in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, as well as some 300 additional students through its weekly homeschooling and afterschool enrichment programs. WonderHere has two additional microschool locations in Florida and South Carolina, with three more locations scheduled to open in the fall.

The founders' goal wasn't simply to create an alternative to conventional schooling. It was to prove that a different approach to learning could work—and eventually to bring that approach back to the public school system.

"I remember feeling really distraught about leaving, but also extremely hopeful because I really believed I could make a change. I just didn't think I could do it where I was," Thenor recalled.

Thenor and Zivkovich are representative of many of today's new school founders: public school educators who wanted to make change from within the system but ultimately left to build their own innovative learning models. With a decade of proof that a more child-centered, play-filled educational approach can produce happy, successful students outside the conventional classroom, Thenor and Zivkovich are bringing their WonderHere microschooling model inside the public school system. "Our goal has always been to influence public education," said Thenor.

Last week, the Polk County School Board unanimously approved a two-year contract with WonderHere to integrate their microschooling model into the Philip O'Brien Elementary School. "It is full circle for us," said Thenor, noting how special it is to be launching the WonderHere pilot inside the school where she and Zivkovich taught.

Beginning this fall, WonderHere will run two of Philip O'Brien Elementary's combined kindergarten–first grade classrooms, each with about 15 students. Parents and caregivers will be able to opt their children into the program, which will be embedded within the school but will follow WonderHere's distinct educational model, including four hours of project-based unit studies covering core curriculum areas, narrative teacher assessments instead of traditional grading and two hours each day of outside play time and nature-based learning. Thenor and Zivkovich will identify and train the classroom teachers in the WonderHere approach, and have a WonderHere staff member onsite to support the classroom teachers.