5 days ago
Mark Zuckerberg's Home School Ran Afoul Of Zoning Regulations, He's Not Alone
Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan were forced to move a small school they were operating out of their home after neighbors alerted Palo Alto's office of planning and development.
While everyone loves a bit of millionaire on billionaire neighborhood drama, the issues at stake in the dispute actually have wider implications for education across the country.
Increasingly, small schools are popping up in homes and libraries and strip malls and the rules and regulations that assume a school is a place with 30 classrooms branching off of central corridors with 500 students learning within them are increasingly ill suited to govern what is going on.
In the Times article, there is debate as to what the Zuckerbergs were actually doing. Is BBS (the name of the outfit) a school? Is it a homeschool co-op? What is the difference between the two? Does that matter?
Documents filed with the state describe it as a 'coed day school' with 14 kindergarten through fourth grade students, three full time teachers, a part time teacher, one administrator, and one other staff member. Representatives from the Zuckerbergs dispute calling it a private school, saying that it came out of a homeschool co-op that formed during the pandemic.
The lines between homeschooling and formal school have been blurring for some time now. If we imagine a spectrum where full-time five-day-per-week schooling outside of the home in a traditional school setting sits at one end and full-time five-day-per-week schooling inside of the home with only siblings and parents sits at the other end, there are lots of stops in between. Homeschool co-ops, hybrid schools, microschools, all blur the lines and allow students to learn together in varying configurations with varying degrees of structure. What the representatives of the Zuckerbergs describe, a school where students pay no tuition and whose parents teach some subjects, would fall in there.
One network of charter schools demonstrates the blending of educational models happening today. Arizona's ASU Preparatory Academy educates more than 7,000 students across a network of charter schools that take quite different forms and approaches. ASU Prep Academies operate in-person classes all week while ASU Prep Digital students work online full time. In between are schools that follow ASU Prep Digital+, like ASU West Valley and ASU Tempe, where students are able to attend school from one to three days per week and work from home for the rest. ASU Prep also operates microschools that they call ASU Prep Learning Pods.
It is not just in the charter sector. Research by Albert Cheng and Dan Hamlin used the National Household Education Survey to gauge the prevalence of four kinds of arrangements amongst homeschooling families: fully parent-delivered home education, home education supplemented by online learning, home education supplemented by private tutoring or a homeschool co-op, and home schooling supplemented by part-time enrollment in a brick-and-mortar school. They found that, 'most homeschool families supplement home education with cooperative instructors and private tutors, online education, and brick-and-mortar schooling.' It is, in fact, the distinct minority of homeschooling families that solely operate with parent-directed instruction from home.
The majority of homeschooling families are blending together different educational environments and providers to round out their child's education.
Some co-op like structures start to get more formal. They meet at regular times in regular places. They have a consistent set of instructors. But are they schools? What about a program that meets for two days per week, but has students learn from home the rest? Is it a school? Or, if a student is learning from home, but through an online course of study, is their home their school? Where do they go every day?
This isn't just a 'how many angels can dance on the head of a pin' semantic game. These distinctions matter, because, as the Zuckerbergs found out, once something get the moniker 'school' the rules and regulations start to stack up.
In a column earlier this year, I recounted the story of Alison Rini and Starlab in Florida, who attempted to rework a daycare facility in the center of a public housing project into a small learning center for the children of the community. But once more than five school-age children started to attend it, local zoning authorities said it was a school and that it needed the proper fire suppression infrastructure as any other school would.
Another column, with direct relevance to the Zuckerberg's zoning issues, referenced a report by Florida's Teach Coalition that outlined all of the different ways in which zoning is affecting new school formation. In some localities, zoning boards are requiring architectural renderings, traffic studies, and engineering reports, and nixing new schools for altering the character of the area or increasing traffic. They are even making requirements that schools cannot be sited on main roads, that all of their classrooms have to be on the ground floor, and have massive lot sizes, all of which makes small school formation prohibitively expensive.
There are broader questions as to why schools, and particularly private schools, are singled out by zoning authorities. As the Teach Coalition report uncovered, public schools usually benefit from 'by right' zoning while private schools need special exemptions from planning authorities to gain access to a facility. And, the Zuckerbergs would conceivably be allowed to do many things in their homes, like host large dinner parties that affect parking and traffic, without needing the go ahead from planning authorities.
If zoning regulations are not updated to take into account the new forms that schools are taking, it will not just be the Zuckerbergs that run afoul of their local planning offices.
