Curious Mike’s Visit to Rain Lily Microschool

Microschooling Journeys

Episode 5: Mike G “Solo” describes visit to Rain Lily Microschool

Edited for clarity

[00:00:00] Mike Goldstein: Hey, this is Curious Mike. I’m here in Florida. It’s like 75 degrees. Back home in Boston, to my wife and kids: Hello, it’s 20 degrees.

We’re going to do something different today with our podcast, Microschooling Journeys. It’s just me talking.  (A story in 3 parts).

Part One

Part one of this story is five years ago. I want you to picture Kati.

[00:00:50] She’s wearing piece earrings, you know, the piece earrings, Birkenstocks, professionally, she’s a little beaten down.

She recalls: “I was wondering, did I want to continue to teach?”

Back in the day, public school isn’t never what she had really wanted. And she was working at a Montessori school, which in theory was what she wanted. But she felt like her school wasn’t really what Maria Montessori, that old Italian lady…it wasn’t really what Montessori was about.

Kati: It’s wealthy parents who treat us, the teachers, like daycare workers, not really like valued teachers or professionals.  (They’d just announce) “We’re doing such and such an activity on Saturday.”  Well what about my own kids? And there was no extra pay. The contract said other duties as needed. But it was really this kind of sense of entitlement. There were fundraisers, and we teachers would wonder, where would the money even go? We don’t know.

All of that led Kati to think, I don’t know how much I want to keep doing this. And her kids at the time were a teen and a tween, and Kati’s is a mixed race family.

Pause for a second. Now it’s Mike, the editorial Mike, offering a little commentary.

I don’t want to go too far down the DEI track, but it is important to this story. So let me hit it briefly. I think right now, 2025, blue states and cities, certainly Boston, Massachusetts are having their own reckoning with DEI. Is it going too far? And there’s this kind of intra-Democratic Party fight.

That’s not the topic here.  In very red places, like Nassau County, Florida, DEI doesn’t mean, I think, what it means today, broadly. It’s a bit more, to me, as I’m absorbing it, it’s like what 2005 was like in Boston.  I think here, what Kati means when she uses that phrase mostly means tolerance. That a four year old would just say, yeah, I have two mommies, and nobody would freak out. The adults would be very welcoming and teach the other kids to be very welcoming, and there wouldn’t be, like, weird snarky stuff behind the scenes, parent conversations. And similarly, that you would purposefully want to bring together people from different social classes and races.  We’re right by the Amelia River and St. Mary’s River. And that’s kind of the only blue on the map, is the rivers.  End of Mike commentary.

Now Tania, she’s also an early educator. She grew up in Cuba, decides to be a teacher. They’ve got like a five year training program. Cuba’s got some pretty long extensive training programs. And this is for early education.

[00:04:51] She gets married, she has her own kids, and finally, it’s like the Cuba story, like, my kids have no freedom, we got to get out of here. So she leaves her two kids with mom, and the journey is to Ecuador, and then to Guatemala, and there’s buses, and there’s boats, and there’s payments, and finally, She gets to the U.

[00:05:12] S. where there’s a special deal, as you may know, for Cubans, a special immigration deal. She starts at the bottom. Tania gets a job in daycare, and to her eye, it’s like a free for all. Like, the training she noted for daycare workers is like 40 days, she’s like, I was trained for five years, like, it’s sort of a different view here, and she works her way up the ladder.  For a while, she becomes the assistant teacher to Kati, then becomes a full fledged teacher.

Tania’s struck by the lack of clinical understanding and professionalism of many early educator in USA versus Cuba. Like, from her point of view, it’s tough to do it the right way with the three and the four year olds, to get the kids learning.  You’re not just trying to avoid catastrophic injury where they don’t push each other off the monkey bars.

And so Kati and Tania are both in the same professional place: I kind of like my work, but I don’t necessarily like the setting.

Kati says to Tania, “Hey, maybe we should start our own school.”  End of part one.

Part Two

Let’s rewind the clock now back to 2017. And I’m chatting, Mike, with Matt Kramer. I’ve known him a little over the years.  He has left his job as the co-CEO of Teach for America? Big, the biggest non profit in the education space, arguably. But the politics there were getting crazy.

Matt left, and by 2017, has just founded this non profit network of progressive Montessori micro schools called Wildflower. And when I chat with him, back then, he’s got that energy that you see in people when they’re just going deep in a new area and they freaking love it. Like the sparks are just popping out of his brain.

Matt is discovering all this stuff about Maria Montessori back in the day, and he’s trying to reconcile her vision with everything he’s learned in his long stint at Teach for America, which uses a lot of analytical tools to try to understand their impact. And he’s thinking about modernizing Montessori and technology in historically a low technology setting.

For Wildflower, Matt wants to identify teacher leaders, people just like Kati and Tania, and he wants to help them cross the chasm and actually launch their own little school.

(In episode 6 of our podcast, I’ll interview Matt.  For now, you just need to understand that Wildflower is a thriving network that helps teachers found their own Montessori microschools).

Kati and Tania say: “Let’s do it.”

They get connected with wildflower, particularly a woman on Matt’s team named Danielle.

First part of their journey is Tania realizes she’s told, “Oh, guess what? You have a non compete in your contract.”

It’s like classic contract, six pages long, it’s so dense. I mean, who of us read it? (As non-Curious Mike), I probably have signed three digital license agreements this morning just to navigate my computer.  None of us read these things.

Hers has a non compete. Okay. A normal non compete would just be like, you can’t steal our customers at the current fancy private Montessori and bring them to your little micro school, which I think would be totally reasonable clause. They say she can’t even participate at all for the one year period in the founding of the school, irrespective of customers.   Even if she says, I’ll do a no poaching agreement, I’ll never take any families from your school. That’s not enough. They want to block her from working with Kati, and they succeed in doing that.

Moreover, they say she’s not allowed to teach Montessori.  I got so angry, honestly, just hearing about this. There’s a role for non compete. But this is not the role. You can’t tell someone they can’t be an early childhood educator anywhere when they are.  This had like a 45 mile radius or some crazy thing. So Tania for a year works as a teacher, like 45 miles away. That was her commute.

Okay, so and part of Curious Mike just wants to do a deep expose on this school that forced the non-compete, but like, that’s just Mike; Kati and Tania have moved on.

But I imagined Sarah, you know, Sarah Bullock playing the villain, playing against type, playing the villain in this movie and enforcing the non-compete, but okay, we’re letting that part go.

Tania is out of commission. It’s Kati on her own, but Wildflower is kind of there for her every step of the way.

She’s got to find a building and it’s not working with this realtor. So she gets a new one. And then a new one after that, and like, finally the fourth one, bingo. So then they have a building, but it needs a renovation.  Wait, there’s a septic system issue.

And Wildflower helps her get a pro bono attorney.  They helped her build her website.  Kati gets to keep calling Danielle.

Here’s what’s going on. And Danielle’s like the guide. It’s almost like Montessori for adults who want to found their own school.  Kati does the work like the children are supposed to do, the self discovery. And Kati really did it. I mean, she put in the work. She went to the public hearings. With the community, you know, the Rotary Club type stuff to build up a local network. She even took like a small business class at the SBA. I was really impressed.

But Wildflower is there as the guide and really helping her understand startup. And Kati was so pleased with that when I spoke to her. And so Tania waits out her one year non compete. Finally, the two are reunited and a few years ago they opened the school.

Okay, part three.

Yesterday, I visited Rain Lily Microschool, and it was totally charming. 36 kids there, which is their full capacity, and it’s happy, and it’s vibrant, and it’s Tania and Kati, and two assistant teachers, and I’m watching Playtime, and it’s great. I mean, you can just tell, there’s a difference. Like how you everybody knows this like how the three and four year olds interact with each other when they’re playing and there were just so many nice moments and You know at one point like instead of stacking the rocks like three year old starts to like I’ll just throw the rock and like he gets the redirect the perfect redirect and it worked and Then I was watching, you know classic circle time like To lead teachers, take a bunch of kids, and, you know, reading a book out loud, and talking about it, all that stuff, again, when you see it done well, and all the kids are engaged, and all the little distraction stuff gets patrolled in just the right kind but firm way, I mean, that’s just magic.

[00:13:11] And Pru and I, like, we would have immediately, if we had visited this school and it was nearest in Boston, this would have been our preschool, easily. So the Rain Lily Microschool website, it says who they are, I read, quote, “We are an intentionally diverse community of learners with equity and inclusivity at the core of our guiding principles.”

[00:13:31] So again, in blue states, this is unexceptional. In Nassau County, it probably sticks out.

A typical Montessori Private in this area is probably 20 grand a year. At Rain Lily, it’s a sliding scale. It’s 12 grand down to about 7 or 8. But the cool thing is, there’s various subsidies, which really allows these different social classes to enter the school.

There’s a VPK, virtual preschool voucher. There’s a school readiness voucher. And what I’ve talked about on the podcast before for kindergartners, you can use the education savings account. Similarly for special needs students.

So there’s a lot of ways to bring down the family cost for this in Florida to almost nothing.

[00:14:22] I mean, families are getting like a beautiful quality experience, you know, something they can afford. Some families are putting in 100 bucks a month. That’s what they can afford.

But on the back end, Rain Lily is making it work financially. And I was just pleased to see this.

With that said, the work is exhausting because basically what Kati and Tania are doing is they’re doing the lead teacher work by day and they’re doing leadership work at night.

Kati told me, “ I always wonder, am I like forgetting something?”

That to do list as an administrator, which I recall some fondness from when I ran a school, but with some trepidation, that’s a long list.  But (Kati and Tania) built something real. And I feel like as co founders, they’ve achieved their dream is, at least that’s the way it looks to me.

And I feel like Matt Kramer, as part of the Wildflower Network, is doing what he told me he dreamed of back in 2017. He’s got now a network and his team, he and his team, the Wildflower team, they’ve got 70 schools like this across the U. S., these micro schools, all of them are teacher led. So next up. Our next episode, Curious Mike gets to interview Matt Kramer, the CEO of Wildflower.

[00:15:41] And I want to hear his take broadly on micro schools. I want to hear his take broadly on how his inclusion vision is going and how he’s modernizing micro schools. I want to hear the full story and I bet you do too. So please tune in for that.