We’re Reporters, Not Teachers. We Were Able to Start Private Schools Anyway.

Reporters partnered with local journalists across three states to establish private schools. In Arkansas, establishing a school required filling out a state website form, paying $45, and purchasing an American flag. This process was reported by the Arkansas Times. In West Virginia, a school was established after filing a name and location on notebook paper and exchanging emails. In North Carolina, a notice of intent to open a private school was filed online for a location at Ponysaurus Brewing Co. in Durham. The reporters used their own names and news organization email addresses to follow state rules for starting private or microschools.

The narrative demonstrates that low regulatory hurdles, particularly concerning private and microschool establishment across state lines, create a fertile environment where journalistic inquiry can bypass traditional institutional gatekeeping. The ease with which reporters navigated registration processes—using names and journalistic identities to form entities—reveals a systemic gap between the legal requirements for operation and the administrative oversight provided by education departments. The specific pivot toward microschool status in West Virginia, which allowed for the circumvention of building safety inspections by leveraging state definitions, highlights how legal definitions can be strategically manipulated to achieve desired operational outcomes while avoiding external scrutiny. This suggests that regulatory structures, when layered with minimal external checks on non-traditional educational models, permit a rapid proliferation where accountability becomes secondary to existence. The final refusal to accept the required school-specific inspection in North Carolina underscores the friction point where journalistic exploration meets specific public safety mandates, showing that even low-barrier processes encounter hard physical limits, suggesting that procedural ease does not equate to total freedom from external constraints.