LAUDERDALE LAKES, Fla.— Khyla Beaujin’s first fashion show as a designer was over, and she described the backstage chaos to her mother.

Where are the models?

Where are their shoes?

Who has the jewelry?

Khyla was frustrated at times and overwhelmed at others because the designers shared models and the models shared shoes, and confusion reigned. But she maintained her composure and pulled everything together, and the models strutted the catwalk with quiet poise, wearing Khyla’s spring collection.

It was a proud night for Khyla, then 12 years old, because she worked hard creating her collection during the months leading up to the event.

Khyla recounted all this to her mom post-show in a breathless monologue.

“The look on her face, the smile, I'm like, ‘Oh, I love this for you.’” Sheyla Bens Beaujin said.

Year One as a student at the South Florida Fashion Academy (SF/FA) ended that night for Khyla, and Sheyla knew her daughter was where she needed to be, attending a school that would nurture her love for fashion design.

Khyla is now a seventh grader at SF/FA, a private Pre-K-12 school in Lauderdale Lakes that incorporates fashion design, cosmetology, nail technology, barbering, skin care, business, and entrepreneurship with core classes. Khyla attends the school with the help of a Florida Tax Credit Scholarship managed by Step Up For Students and funded by corporate donations to the nonprofit.

“This is her passion,” Sheyla said, “so finding that school was really a life-saving experience. She’s found so much joy and purpose there.”

While Khyla was involved in a number of extracurricular activities and sports at her previous school, Calvary Christian Academy, her interest always returned to fashion design.

It’s something Khyla picked up from her mom at an early age, when Sheyla started her own children’s clothing line – KHYKOUTURE – and used Khyla as a model. Khyla enjoys walking the runway but not as much as she enjoys finding a top and a blanket at a thrift store and using her imagination, a sewing machine, and all the tools in her sewing kit to turn them into a dress or gown.

“I guess seeing my mom make all those outfits for me when I was little inspired me to do the same,” Khyla said.

Sheyla learned of SF/FA on social media when Khyla was in the fifth grade. She and Khyla toured the school, which is a 30-minute drive from their Hollywood home. All Khyla had to see was Room 117, which is filled with mannequins and sewing machines, and she was sold.

“Best room in the school,” Khyla said.

She enrolled in the sixth grade for the 2023-24 school year, eager to see what the world of fashion was all about.

Now Khyla talks about attending a fashion school in New York City and having her work featured during Fashion Week in Paris, London, and New York.

“That's why I'm glad I'm going to this school so I can work on my skills,” she said. “I think I'm really going to do this. I'm really going to pursue this dream and stick to it till the end.”

***

In 2018, Taj McGill started a fashion program for students in South Florida that met in a one-room building on Saturdays. By 2021, she realized there was enough interest to start a dedicated school. SF/FA now has 75 students, many of them with dreams as big as Khyla’s.

McGill, who grew up in South Florida, has a degree in fashion design and merchandising. She has worked in various careers within the fashion industry for more than 20 years. She’s attending Fashion Week in those far-off cities. Her students are introduced to a cross-section of people from the fashion industry.

“South Florida isn't really known as a fashion capital although it is beginning to develop. I am intentional about exposing our students to the various careers within the industry and introducing creatives to professionals that inspire them to dream,” McGill said. “They can actually have a job in these specific career fields that we cater to here at SF/FA. They can flourish in those industries.

“If there were a school like this when I was a child, oh, my God, I would have been in heaven. If I was able to complete my core academic classes and then have classes in fashion or beauty or business, it would have been so great for me. So, I essentially created what I wanted as a child.”

In addition to the sewing lab, there is a room with barber chairs for hairstyling and another for nail technology and cosmetology. Students can dually enroll in the fashion program at Saint Thomas University in Miami Gardens, Miami Fashion Institute, or the University of South Florida.

“You don’t get this kind of experience anywhere else,” Khyla said.

Every student is involved in the end-of-the-year fashion show, from the designers to the models, to the cosmetologist to the hair stylist. The photography, video, social media, red carpet, and marketing are all done by students.

***

In nearly two years at SF/FA, Khyla has emerged as one of the school’s top students, with a 4.0 GPA. Her designs allow her to stand out, as well.

“She's determined,” McGill said. “She works really, really hard, and it's important to her to be a leader to her peers.”

 

Last year, Khyla designed three outfits for the fashion show. This year, it could be as many as seven. It will feature a rainbow of princess gowns inspired by the movie “Inside Out 2,” where the emotions of the main character, a teenage girl, are represented by characters of different colors. Anger is red. Envy is green.

“It was a little confusing at first because I knew I wanted to do the theme, but I didn't know what I wanted to make it,” she said. “So, I was like, ‘OK, let me just do princess dresses,’ and I can just do them with the ‘Inside Out’ colors and incorporate them into the designs.”

Sheyla has never seen the movie, so she’s not sure what Khyla is trying to accomplish. But that’s the case with all of Khyla’s concepts.

“When she tells me about them and I don’t get what she’s trying to do, she tells me, ‘Wait till you see where it’s going,’ and then I see the final product and I’m amazed,” she said.

Sheyla took a sewing class in Miami before starting her children’s line. She was the only adult in the class. The rest were students who were homeschooled.

“That stuck with me because I wanted my children to have the same opportunities,” she said.

Now a detention sergeant with the Broward Sheriff’s Office, Sheyla can give Khyla the educational opportunity she wished she had, thanks to Step Up For Students.

“Without Step Up, Khyla would have never gotten the opportunity to be in this school,” Sheyla said. “So, it's a wonderful thing that kids like Khyla can have an opportunity to let their talent flourish while focusing also on her academics.”

At SF/FA, McGill serves as a role model, as do the guest lecturers. The students feed off each other’s creativity and dreams. Khyla talks about attending the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and having her designs featured at all the big shows in Paris and London.

“That makes me proud,” Sheyla said, “and it allows me to encourage her because I know those dreams are attainable.”

 

DAVENPORT, Fla. – Valeria Oquendo didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur. “Ms. V,” as her students call her, had wanted to be a teacher since she was a teenager. On her way to an elementary education degree, she interned at a public school and, initially, those dreams became even clearer.

“Still in my brain I was thinking, ‘I’m going to graduate, I’m going to have my perfect classroom, I’m going to be a first grade teacher,’ “she said.

But then, in education-choice-rich Florida, a funny thing happened.

Oquendo’s “side hustle” became her full-time gig.

When COVID-19 hit in 2020, friends and family begged Oquendo to tutor their children, many of whom were struggling with online instruction. Oquendo was still in college. But before she knew it, she was tutoring 20 kids.

The light bulb flickered on.

Today, Oquendo runs Start Bright Tutoring, a mobile tutor and a la carte education provider in this insanely fast-growing corner of metro Orlando.

She focuses on elementary reading and math, with 20 to 30 students who are homeschooled or in public schools. A handful use state-supported education savings accounts (ESAs), and it’s highly likely even more will use them in the future.

Demand is soaring. When Oquendo pitched her business on TikTok, mayhem ensued: She racked up hundreds of thousands of views and put 70 students on a wait list before being forced to stop taking calls.

Now Oquendo sees a future outside of traditional schools not only for herself, but for other young educators. As choice continues to expand, she said, more and more can tap into the new possibilities.

“Everybody has their niche,” said Oquendo, 26. “It all depends on the effort and not giving up.”

Florida is humming with former public school teachers who, thanks to choice, have created their own learning models. Their often-inspiring stories (like this and this and this) are becoming commonplace.

Oquendo, though, is the next wave: Educators creating their own options instead of becoming traditional public school teachers.

Oquendo represents a couple of other fascinating trend lines, too.

She’s a niche provider instead of a school, which allows her to serve Florida’s fastest-growing choice contingent: a la carte learners.

Florida has multiple ESA programs that give families flexibility to pursue options beyond schools. With ESAs, they can choose from an ever-growing menu of providers, like Start Bright, to assemble the program they want. The main vehicle for doing that, the Personalized Education Program scholarship, met its state cap of 60,000 students this year, up from 20,000 last year.

Oquendo’s decision to create an option on wheels is also noteworthy.

Florida’s education landscape gets more diverse and dynamic every day. But it’s still rife with frustrating stories about talented teachers trying to set up microschools and other innovative models, only to run into outdated zoning and building codes and/or code enforcers who seem to be curiously inflexible. (Thankfully, some still find happy endings.)

Until those barriers are addressed, going mobile – something choice visionaries suggested nearly 50 years ago – may be one way out.

Oquendo is the daughter of a police officer and an accountant. After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, the family moved to Florida, and she enrolled in the University of Central Florida.

Oquendo said she was fortunate to have an amazing teacher as her mentor when she interned at a public school. But she was also haunted by the moment the teacher told her the class needed to move on to the next unit of study, even though several students, including one with a learning disability and another learning English, were not ready.

“She said, ‘This is what we do.’ “Translation: We have to move on.

That experience pushed Oquendo to choose a different path, too.

Initially she wanted to steer her tutoring venture into a microschool. She found a good location, but the building needed $15,000 in adjustments to meet building codes, and even then, there was no guarantee of a green light from local officials. Oquendo was bummed. Thankfully, her mom came to the rescue, inspired by a mobile grooming service the family uses for its Schnauzers.

“She said, ‘Why don’t you get a van and make it a mobile classroom?” Oquendo said. “I was like, ‘Mom, the kids are not pets.’ “

Upon further investigation, mom was on to something. In the summer of 2021, Oquendo spent $8,000 for a 2014 Ford E-350 shuttle bus, then another $7,000 to turn it into a mini-classroom. Ms. V’s van is complete with desks, bins, lights, shelves, computers – and just about anything else you’d find in a typical classroom.

That fall, Oquendo was up and running, visiting students in their homes. At some point, she realized she could reach more families if she parked at locations that were still convenient – like shopping plazas – and have them meet her there.

Oquendo’s TikToks came just months after she earned her degree. The response was understandable, she said, given that many families lived the same reality she witnessed as an intern.

“It’s the system,” she said. “If it was better, we wouldn’t have the demand.”

Oquendo said many families also respond to her because they share a cultural connection. She was still struggling with English when her family moved to Florida, and many of her students are English language learners, too. She offers living proof they will overcome.

“I tell them, ‘I get you,’ “she said. “I tell them, ‘It’s okay to make mistakes. I love mistakes.’ That way, they’re not afraid.”

Forging her own path has not been all peaches and cream.

At one point, the van engine died, and Oquendo had to find $6,000 to replace it. At another, she invested in solar panels, hoping to cut down on fuel costs for air conditioning. But they didn’t work as she hoped. “I didn’t have a guide,” she said. “I just had myself – and my mistakes.”

At the same time, she said, she takes satisfaction in knowing her students are making progress. And that she has the power to quickly adjust, both for them and herself.

Oquendo is shifting to serve more students whose parents want in-home tutoring for longer stretches. She’s adding Spanish lessons. She’s also offering monthly field trips to places like LEGOLAND and a local farm.

On a whim, Oquendo recently set up gardening lessons for interested families, essentially sub-contracting with an organic farmer. Her students loved it.

In South Florida, similar operators are realizing they fit into changing definitions of teaching and learning and becoming ESA providers themselves.

Oquendo said the challenges to doing her own thing are real. But the freedom to control her own destiny, and to better help students in the process, makes it all worth it.

“I feel happy, blessed, and fortunate to be doing what I love the most,” she said.

VERO BEACH, Fla. – For eight years, Danielle McLean couldn’t believe her luck. Through all of pre-school and elementary school, her twin boys Jackson and Lincoln, both on the autism spectrum, had only three teachers. Two were Teacher of the Year finalists in their east Central Florida school district, and all of them, McLean believed, were exceptional.

So, when it came time for middle school, McLean was distraught. She was not hearing good things about where her boys were headed. And at a meeting last October to discuss next steps, two of their teachers weren’t optimistic either. “I’m almost in tears,” McLean recalled. “I’m like, ‘Where should I go?’ “

One of the teachers, Ryan Sandgren, wasn’t sure where he was going either. He had his own frustrations with the system. He told McLean, “If you created something, we are willing to be creative with you.”

McLean got the hint. That night she asked, “Alexa, how do you start a school?”

McLean did not start a “school.”

But last month, she, Sandgren, the other teacher at the meeting, Jessica Geary, and Megan Knowles, a speech language pathologist, opened the nonprofit Keystone Education Center.

Keystone is a full-time tutoring operation for students in grades three through seven that focuses on life skills, job skills, and academics. It uses 1,600 square feet of space in a church. It serves 17 students, including 16 on the autism spectrum and many with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, also known as ADHD.

All of them use the Family Empowerment Scholarship for Students with Unique Abilities, a state-funded education savings account administered by Step Up For Students.

It’s the funding and flexibility of those ESAs that allowed the foursome to create the learning model they wanted.

“The whole journey has been this pinch-me-I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening,” said McLean, who was briefly a public school teacher herself.

“It was always like a dream, to have a school to help students in need, to have more control and input” into how education should be done, said Sandgren, who worked in public schools for eight years. “You look around and you’re like, ‘I can do this.’ If you have the right team, you can.”

The story of Keystone Education Center underscores so many distinctive subplots happening in Florida, the most choice-rich state in America.

For one, it’s not a school. That’s significant because as Florida leads the nation in the transition from school choice to education choice, more diverse options like tutoring centers, hybrid homeschools, and a la carte providers are on the rise.

The teacher empowerment angle is key, too. The former public school teachers who co-founded Keystone join a growing list of teachers who are finding choice is giving them the power to create what they think is best, rather than submit to bureaucracies they find smothering. A number of them are creating options, like this one and this one and this one, that are specifically for students with special needs.

Sandgren comes from a family of public school educators. He said he’s always been passionate about helping students with special needs develop their talents. But sometimes, in traditional settings, obstacles creep into the way, like, in his view, too much emphasis on standardized testing, or classes with such a wide variety of special needs, no student truly gets the instruction they need.

“There came a breaking point,” he said.

Keystone is also another good example of the barriers that continue to challenge education entrepreneurs even when robust choice programs are in place.

The founders had no problem attracting families who wanted an alternative to traditional schools. “I didn’t need to do a market analysis,” McLean said. “I knew there was a gap for kids like mine.”

But finding a building that was affordable and accessible? Different story.

McLean said the pickings were so slim, the founders considered signing a lease for a building that would have cost $8,000 a month. Fortunately, McLean was relentless in reaching out to local pastors. and one of them offered church space for a fraction of that cost.

Keystone’s founders plan to add a grade a year through high school. They’re emphasizing small class sizes, best practices from applied behavioral sciences, and character development to nurture lifelong learners who can “thrive beyond the classroom as kind, contributing citizens.”

“We want to make learning applicable to real life,” Sandgren said.

The center’s schedule reflects those goals.

Mondays are for recreational activities and social clubs. The founders wanted to make sure students eased into the week and started on a joyful note.

Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are for core academics.

Fridays are for field trips. Publix, the movie theater, the bowling alley – anywhere, McLean said, where community-based instruction can help students work on functional skills.

Geary, who worked in public schools for 10 years, said she’s grateful for Florida’s choice programs and what they’re allowing her to do as an educator.

Having meaningful input into core components like curriculum and scheduling and assessment is a pleasant contrast to the dynamic in district schools, she said. Recently, the team at Keystone called a local business that offers sailing lessons to see if it could accommodate Keystone students on a field trip. (The answer was yes.)

“I could never do something like that at the district,” Geary said.

The rush of creating your own option, she continued, is “better than I ever though it could be.”