Today we’d like to introduce you to Lacey Fickes and Taylor Munro.
Hi Lacey and Taylor, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Hi! We started as colleagues, became the best of friends, and most recently, the owners and founders of PEAK Academy in Richmond! With over thirty-five years of combined teaching experience, we have seen many changes in public education. By the time we said, “enough is enough,” we had zero autonomy in our own classrooms, and spent our days preparing students to take standardized tests. This created a philosophical conflict between what we knew was best for children and the expectation of teaching a one-size-fits-all curriculum to a wonderfully diverse group of students.
After a particularly frustrating day at school, we started brainstorming what else we could do. While we desperately wanted to continue pursuing our callings to teach, we knew remaining in the overcrowded, high-stress, unsustainable environment of our current school was no longer an option, so we began to see what alternatives were out there for passionate teachers like us. Our research led us to micro-schools; a term that, at the time, was brand new to us.
We read books, listened to podcasts, visited several nearby micro-schools, met with their founders, and asked countless questions. We wanted to learn everything we could about these intentionally small, mixed-age, individualized learning communities that fostered the potential in each student as an individual, rather than expecting all students to learn the same things, the same way, at the same time. We then enrolled in a 12-week-long cohort for educational entrepreneurs from all over the country, which taught us the business side of things.
We were enthralled with everything we were learning, and it breathed new life into both of us. After seeing our excitement and renewed enthusiasm, we got the green light from our families to move forward with our new, big dream. We almost immediately started brainstorming names for our school that would reflect our vision and ideals, and it didn’t take long before we settled on PEAK Academy… Passion, Excellence, Autonomy, and Knowledge.
After we had established our name, we created our logo, built our website, calendar, and social media content, searched for a space, met with prospective families, and wrote (many, many) grants… all while continuing to teach full-time and pour as much as we could into the students who were sitting in our classrooms. It was a busy, but very exciting time!
Fast forward to August 2022… With one student on our roster, we worked around the clock, cleaning, painting, repairing, building, and transforming a well-loved summer camp space into PEAK Academy’s first home, just one week prior to our first day of school. It was then that we learned that our community was in need of a homeschool hybrid option, so we mapped out what that would look like, opened enrollment to families, posted on social media, and interest spiked.
Our student enrollment grew by two, and we began our school year with three precious kids. Our brave founding families took a huge leap of faith with two teachers who shared a big dream, and we are forever grateful. Our enrollment has increased organically throughout the year, and we currently have fourteen students.
Numbers for next year are around twenty and climbing, and in the interest of keeping our student-teacher ratios low, we plan to hire a third teacher who shares our passion and ideals. We will soon be moving to a beautiful farmhouse nearby that is located on several acres, and we are excited to call it home for next year.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Considering that we are new to the business side of education, it has been a fairly smooth road, and our struggles have been minimal. We have not taken out any loans, but we have also not taken a salary this year, so our biggest struggle has been financial. We received a $10,000 grant from the VELA Education Fund which has sustained us this year, and we offer after-school tutoring to nearby public school students to generate additional income. This summer, we will be hosting 1, 2, or 3 day mini-camps to prevent the “summer slide” and help us continue to stay afloat financially.
We are eager to find a permanent location to call our own someday, but the timing hasn’t been quite right yet. We remain patient, knowing that the right space will become available at the perfect time.
We’ve all heard horror stories about going into business with friends, but this new venture has worked beautifully. Jumping into this alone wouldn’t have been feasible, and jumping into this with anyone else wouldn’t have worked. We make a great team, both personally and professionally, and we are so excited and grateful to be where we are, just eight months after opening our doors.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
We are both super passionate educators with big hearts for kids. We believe that ALL children can learn, and we opened our school to prove just that. One of the aspects that we didn’t expect was the trauma that some of our students brought with them from public school; the effects of which we had to deliberately help them unlearn. We both still believe that public school works for many… it just doesn’t work for all. We also believe that the majority of public school administrators and educators are doing the very best they can; some of our dearest friends are excellent, passionate, hardworking public school teachers.
Along with the decreased joy and heightened anxiety that we saw in students, we also began to see that there was very little intrinsic motivation, learning, or thinking happening in our classrooms. From students asking for help with tasks before attempting them, asking for help with tasks they are able to easily do independently, and having to repeat directions immediately after giving them… we realized that many of our students had lost the ability to truly think. This is something that we are very intentional about at PEAK Academy. If one of our kids asks for help on something we feel they are able to do themselves, we will say something like, “I want you to try first,” or “see if you can solve that problem yourself.”
Not only has this given us the time and energy we need to focus on closing gaps and challenging our students, but it has also sent our kids the clear message that we believe in their abilities to be successful problem-solvers. In just eight short months of being intentional about this, we have seen a tremendous improvement in our students’ self-esteem, ability to solve problems, and belief in themselves. Children are abundantly more capable than they are often given the opportunity to be.
Before PEAK Academy, our students would enter the classroom each day and immediately ask if there were any tests or graded assignments scheduled for that day. This is in stark contrast to the eager, enthusiastic, and happy children that bound into our school each morning. We have restored joy to learning and, as a result, our students are reluctant to leave at the end of each day. Much like how many of us felt about school when we were growing up, PEAK Academy has become a place our kids look forward to coming to and love to be.
We’d love to hear what you think about risk-taking.
Neither of us are natural risk-takers; jumping ship on public school meant abandoning the security, comfort, and paychecks that we’d been accustomed to for such a long time… but those things were costing us our mental health, our physical health, and precious time with our own families. The years and years we spent working 60+ hour weeks were never enough to get on top of our ever-growing to-do lists, and left us with next-to-nothing to give our loved ones.
From the outside, I’m sure that us leaving the world we knew to build something brand new (with no guarantee of success) looked like the riskiest thing we could have ever done, but we both knew we could do it, and we knew the payoff would far outweigh the risk… and it has! Looking back now, we both wish we would have done this sooner… but had we not reached our breaking point, we wouldn’t have had the courage to go for it. It was a risk so worth taking!
Pricing:
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Full-Time Tuition: $1,275 per month
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Homeschool Hybrid Tuition: $750 per month (3 days per week)
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1:1 Tutoring: $50 per hour
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1:3 Tutoring: $35 per hour
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Summer Mini-Camp: $62.50 per day
Contact Info:
- Website: www.peak-academy.org
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/
peakacademytexas - Facebook: www.facebook.com/
peakacademytexas - Twitter: https://twitter.com/
academy2peak - Youtube: https://www.youtube.
com/@peakacademytexas
