McALPIN, Fla. – Maybe it stands to reason that in a remote community surrounded by hay fields and pine plantation, students at a new, K-5 microschool would bring baby horses for show-and-tell, and the teacher would secure donations from Tractor Supply to start a garden. But don’t let stereotypes — or tired myths about school choice in rural areas — limit your imagination about the possibilities here.
The academic offerings at Longwings Academy also include coding … and crochet … and French language immersion. As long as the 10 students and their families like it, and they do, the school’s lone teacher can keep doing what she, and they, want.
“To know we don’t have to follow the pacing guide, and the curriculum guide, and do what the district says to do – it’s just liberating,” said Longwings founder Erica Rimbert, another former public school teacher in school-choice-rich Florida who left a classroom to start a school.
Maybe Suwannee County isn’t the first place that comes to mind for education innovation. But another beautiful thing about education choice is it enables resourceful people to launch good ideas, wherever they are.
Suwannee County is Old Florida and Deep South, 20 miles from the Georgia line. It’s best known for the river that shares its name, and it’s so traditional, it didn’t open up to liquor sales (at least legally) until 2011. About 47,000 people call it home, 1,800 of them in unincorporated McAlpin. The latter is big enough for a Dollar General but not a stoplight.
Rimbert and her family moved here last year, wanting a little land to pursue their passion for horses. In southwest Florida, she worked at a district school that served the children of migrant farm workers. Even then, she had fleeting thoughts of starting her own school, but it wasn’t until moving to Suwannee that it became imperative.
The kicker, Rimbert said, was seeing her oldest daughter, then in kindergarten, and her daughter’s peers, not learning basic things their families thought important. In her daughter’s case, it was not having time to fully pick up French, her father’s native language. For some of the other kids, it was not learning more about farming and livestock, even though their families had strong ties to the land.
“That’s what finalized it for me,” Rimbert said. Sometimes with traditional schools, “there are just needs that are unmet.”
Rimbert wasn’t sure families would want what she was offering. Doubts persisted even though a local official told her during the process of securing a school site that “people are going to come out of the woodwork,” and even though 25 families showed up for open house. It wasn’t until the first day of school that she realized this could work.
“People are just looking for something different,” she said.
Even in McAlpin.
Thanks to parent-directed education policies, more can have it. All the students at Longwings use choice scholarships. And in Florida as a whole, 8,558 students in rural counties were using them in 2021-22, according to an analysis we did.
Longwings is a little different from traditional school in some ways, a lot different in others.
It’s in McAlpin’s only strip mall, next to McAlpin Country Diner. Rimbert has the freedom to pivot whenever and however, with instruction and everything else. But her classroom doesn’t look much different from a typical classroom, except for a few signs in French and a French flag that accompanies the American and Florida flags.
Students start the day with the Pledge of Allegiance. They tackle core subjects. They follow Florida state standards. They take formal tests. Most of them take standardized tests, too, though they’re not “high stakes.” (By law, most of the students using choice scholarships in Florida must take a state-approved standardized test every year.)
The French immersion piece is definitely distinctive.
Rimbert toggles between English and French. On Election Day, the students wrote a few sentences that listed, first in English, then in French, what they would do for America if elected president.
The point isn’t just to learn another language, Rimbert said. It’s “to open the door to learning about another world” and yet more worlds beyond that.
“It’s insane. The kids love it,” she said. “They’ve just taken off with the language.”
Critics of education choice would have you believe a school like Longwings “can’t work” in rural areas, even though in Florida, they’re increasingly common. In 2000, the year before Florida’s private school choice programs began ramping up, 62 private schools operated in Florida’s 30 rural counties. In 2023, there were 130.
What’s happening in Suwannee represents that bigger picture. On the one hand, a few hundred families over the past decade have migrated to options beyond district schools. On the other, the impact on district enrollment has been modest.
According to state data:
- Between 2012-13 and 2022-23, the number of K-12 students in Suwannee, across all sectors, rose from 6,877 to 7,195.
- Over that span, the number of private school students grew from 472 to 737, and private school enrollment share climbed from 7% to 10%.
- At the same time, the number of students in district schools went from 5,995 to 5,935.
At Longwings, Tracy Walker uses a Family Empowerment Scholarship for Students with Unique Abilities for her 10-year-old son, Jarred. He is classified as gifted and diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. At his prior school, he excelled on standardized tests and earned F’s in some classes.
“He was bored out of his mind,” said Walker, a former Army officer and public school teacher who now breeds horses and sells real estate.
Walker said she was willing to take a chance on Longwings because she could tell Rimbert had the chops to deliver a high-quality program, and to tailor a curriculum that worked for Jarred, who loves math and coding. Rimbert “had so much vision on how to stretch them (her students) further,” Walker said. “I felt like it could be a better fit because it was outside the box.”
At Longwings, Jarred can stand up if he feels fidgety. Rimbert shifts him to more advanced concepts as soon as he shows mastery. He and the other students also apply their skills to real-world scenarios, Walker said, for example, by using what they learned in math to determine the length of fencing and the number of fenceposts they needed for their new garden.
Jarred didn’t like school last year, Walker said. But this year, he’s so excited that “he was disappointed when we were out for the hurricanes.”
Rimbert hopes to switch locations next year to a schoolhouse she’s planning on her family’s property. She wants to stay small but thinks she can grow to 25 students without compromising quality.
Like Walker, she doesn’t think rural families are any less likely than other families to want options. If there’s any doubt, she said, it’s only because they haven’t had as many options to access.
Now, with schools like Longwings, “they’re looking and they’re curious,” Rimbert said. At the end of the day, “everybody wants the best thing for their kid.”
