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Are you a creative thinker who is deeply passionate about education and eager to build a new school in your community? Are you a force of nature with the grit and determination to push past any obstacles? If that sounds like you, then you’re qualified. Most of our applicants are educators, community leaders, parents, and professionals. All are inspiring, and share a vision for improving education.

Anyone can start a school – but it takes real commitment and capacity to do the hard work. In our experience supporting Founders across America, we have seen that the most successful Founders have:

• • 10-15 hours per week to commit to building their school
    
    
  • Personal savings and/or a supportive partner to rely on for the first year (if the school doesn’t hit full enrollment right away)
    
    
  • A willingness to take a risk and fail

If this sounds like you, KaiPod Catalyst will be there with you every step of the way and for three years after. If you commit to this journey, we’ll commit to you.

Many of our Catalyst Founders have launched their Microschool within a year of beginning the program. It’s different for everyone, but that’s a reasonable time frame to strive for.

We’re excited about diverse, personalized learning environments. Whether your idea resembles a broad vision or a school focused on areas like STEM, Nature, or Neurodiverse learners, all microschools share the key values of student-centered learning, parental choice, and engaging environments.

No, we don’t believe in that. We want you to be successful and want to be your partner for the long run. If you join our program and launch a school, then we continue providing you support (see below) in exchange for a 10% per-student fee (with a cap). That means you keep 90% of what your school earns with unlimited upside for you.

The core information you need to start your own school is delivered via an online course, so you can work through it at your own pace in the evenings or weekends. In addition, you will be a part of a small group of other Founders for regular accountability meetings and have access to topic workshops, expert sessions, and the highly dynamic Catalyst Community forums. In addition, you’ll also receive regular 1:1 feedback and coaching from our experts.

Starting a school is hard. Our first microschool took approximately 1,500 hours of hard work to launch. Now that we’ve started or supported almost 70 school launches, we have boiled all the steps down and created templates to save you time and money. You should anticipate spending ~10 hours a week (mostly evenings and weekends) for the first 6-8 months. As you get closer to launch, your time commitment increases, converting to full-time once you launch!

We help with introductions to funders, grant writing support, and recommendations to secure initial capital to get your school up and running. We also have a small grant fund of our own for qualified Founders.

Great question!

We have been operating our own Microschools for nearly three years and have the knowledge and experience on what it takes. That experience is reflected in the success rate for our program (6x as many Founders succeed in our program compared to the national average).

You have the freedom to design the school the way you want: the vision, the location, the curriculum, the tuition, and everything else! Our role is to help you bring your vision to life with the resources and expertise we have built. And once you launch, we continue to support you the way you need!

Finally, with our program, YOU own your school. You decide how big it gets, what you make, who you hire, etc. As an entrepreneur, you have unlimited upside…so as your school thrives, so do you!

We’re happy to discuss any questions you have. Send us a message at [email protected]