Polk County contracted a private microschool founded by two teachers who had left a Polk County public school. The Index has coded 21 Florida institutions and found no education-school program built for this sector. Both facts describe the same state in the same year.
This Index's Florida finding is an absence: the most portable education money in America, and no education-school program built for the sector it funds. This note records what filled that absence in one district.
In 2025 the Polk County school board unanimously approved a two-year contract with WonderHere to bring its microschool model into Philip O'Brien Elementary. WonderHere was founded in 2016 by two teachers who had left a Polk County public school. It now runs a state-approved private school of roughly 120 full-time students, plus about 300 students in weekly homeschool enrichment, with additional locations in Florida and South Carolina. Its founders have said since the beginning that their aim was to influence public education.
A public district bought instructional design and staff training from a private microschool operator. It did not buy them from a college of education, a state research arm, or a regional service agency.
The sourcing pattern is not confined to Florida. Elizabeth City-Pasquotank Public Schools in North Carolina — about 4,800 students, roughly 70% economically disadvantaged — opened a 26-student middle-grades microschool where students help run an Airbnb and learn with AI tutoring. The design came from visits to more than 40 schools, including private microschools in Texas. The staffing arithmetic is why design was the binding problem: three teachers and one support staffer are meant eventually to cover four grade levels and about 65 students. Superintendent Keith Parker put it plainly — three people are not going to be able to teach four grade levels.
The limit, before the conclusion. One contract and one out-of-state case are not a pattern. We have not established that any Florida college of education declined this work, was approached, or knew it was available. We have established only where two districts went. Neither school has achievement data, and this note makes no claim about whether either model works. Florida is a systematic pass in the 2026 baseline, but Field Note 06 records that 25 Florida state colleges remain unscanned. A program could exist that we have not found.
What it does establish is a dated demand signal. Districts in the state with the most portable funding in the country are purchasing school-model design on the open market. Somebody is being trained and paid to do that work. Identifying who — and whether any postsecondary institution is among them — is a supply-and-workforce question rather than a program-catalog one, which is the seam this Index was built to watch.
Cite as: When Money Follows the Child. A Florida district needed a school model. It bought one from a microschool operator.. Field Note 09, August 2026. https://www.whenmoneyfollowsthechild.org/notes/09/ Accessed [date].