Hello, I am one of the founders of the Minnesota Ecovillage Project, we have been living on our land for almost a year and the biggest challenge I am currently facing is how to educate my kids.
We are about an hour away from two major metropolitans (Minneapolis and Duluth) but our rural location offers really only one public school choice that I am not super thrilled about. We started our kids there in the fall, in an attempt to be open minded, but there are many downsides, which are likely predictable given our rural location.
I have since tried to do homeschooling and unschooling, but I think understandably, building an ecovillage from the ground up and trying to also educate my kids has been an overwhelming task. Notably difficult to just jump into this with 12 and 13 year olds as well. I think at this point I am hoping to find someone who could serve as their teacher. I wonder about the possibility of a mutually beneficial arrangement where someone seeking community with an educational background could come here and we could pay room and board for them as part of their compensation for teaching? This could be great, but also could get complicated if the teaching part doesn’t work out. I have also discussed creating a small alternative school here and have an educational professional interested in helping with that. That would likely involve inviting people in from outside our currently small IC, and would be a large undertaking but could be an amazing project if someone was interested/this was their passion project.
While I am certainly educated enough to teach my kids, I don’t feel like I can.
Im also looking for advice, maybe there’s someone who has done this and would be willing to talk, help our family solve this? I feel like we could really use a family who raised their kids in IC and solved some of these issues, or even who went through the process of having kids in an IC who could talk to us about our struggle. Its hard to know if we should keep pushing or if its just too hard to do this with kids and should move again to a place where I can feel good about the school options. I feel like the answers to these questions are too complex to be written in a forum. Of course I am open to anyone wanting to discuss the problems of having kids in intentional community here but I am also feeling like conversations verbally are more inline with this degree of complexity. Maybe a IC parents group? Maybe there’s someone whose been through this who could talk to me?
If you’re going through this or have been through this or are an educator (maybe not even a formal teacher, but more someone who would want to mentor kids through their own educational process) lets talk please!