Video: With rural school choice, a pearl of a school


Editor’s note: This is the third video in our series on school choice in rural areas. You can check out the first two here and here. And you can see our paper on the topic, “Rerouting the Myths of Rural Education Choice,” here.

ED Corps High School is a home-grown private school in a part of Florida best known for oysters.

It’s the pearl in the oyster.

Tiny and hidden but incredibly valuable.

A community nonprofit created ED Corps a few years ago to expand opportunities for young people in Franklin County. Franklin County is all of 12,000 people, its biggest towns being Eastpoint (population 2,614), Apalachicola (population 2,341), and Carrabelle (population 2,606).

Life here is woods and water. So ED Corps students spend a good bit of time outdoors, mostly working on conservation projects that help sustain fishing and forestry.

As you’ll see in our new video, they love it.

Right now the school has 11 students, almost all of them using school choice scholarships.

One of the coolest things about school choice is that it allows solutions to come from every direction, whether that’s in a rural community or urban community or any other kind of community.

ED Corps is another beautiful example. The people of Franklin County are so modest, they’d never think to boast about the innovative school they created. So we get to do that.

Enjoy the video.


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BY Ron Matus

Ron Matus is director of Research & Special Projects at Step Up for Students and a former editor of redefinED. He joined Step Up in February 2012 after 20 years in journalism, including eight years as an education reporter with the Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times).

One Comment

Concerned about possible lack of qualified teachers… AND… just how WELL the school will prepare the students for college and “ real life”!!! Charter schools can be a REAL issue when it comes to REAL Education‼️‼️????❤️????‼️????

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