When veteran educator Alison Rini walked into the abandoned Head Start classroom in a Sarasota public housing complex, it was a COVID-19 time capsule—desk shields still up, boxes of masks collecting dust. The space had sat empty for years, and you could tell. But she saw possibility.
Now, two years later, Star Lab serves twenty students in kindergarten through third grade, most of whom live in the surrounding housing. Parents can walk their kids to school. There’s free breakfast, lunch, uniforms, and before- and after-school care. Field trips cost families nothing.
“But the best thing that we do is the personalized learning,” says Alison. “Each kid is on their own path.” She tells the story of a student who was going into second grade but couldn’t read at all. In public schools, she’d been shuffled along despite not acquiring the knowledge and skills to move to the next grade. But at Star Lab, they’re able to meet her where she is—the kindergarten teacher works with her one-on-one. Just months into the school year, the girl’s progress is undeniable. Her mother can’t believe what she can do now.
That student is a great example of what motivated Alison to create Star Lab. As a former principal, she’d grown frustrated watching the conventional system fail kids whose families didn’t fit the mold. “I just wanted to create something that could work for anyone,” she says. “We kind of combine Montessori and direct instruction, and then a lot of outdoor play.”
The school day starts outside with motor lab, which involves 15 stations of balance, hand-eye coordination, core strength, large motor movement, and fine motor movement. They spend around 20 minutes rotating through the stations before heading inside for breakfast, followed by a five-minute mindfulness program to help them get ready for the day.
Academics begin with reading, including phonics and vocabulary, tailored to each student’s abilities and needs. “Everybody goes to a reading group at their level. It has nothing to do with their age,” Alison explains. At the end of every lesson, the kids have fifteen minutes of recess, which is modeled after the play-based education philosophy in Finland.
Following the first recess break, the younger kids go to the Montessori room and do individualized work. The more advanced students continue with reading, but the focus shifts to language comprehension, talking about characters, or writing. Then they switch rooms, so the older kids are in the Montessori room, while the younger kids are in whole-group instruction for math interventions and science. Before lunch, they have a 30-minute recess outside. In the afternoon, students rotate between self-directed learning in the Montessori room and specials, such as art, music, and drama.
The school uses a mastery-based tracking system that Alison developed in collaboration with a consultant. Each skill—from counting to 100 to identifying story characters—gets color-coded on shared dashboards. Yellow means “not yet.” Green is “started.” Purple is “mastery.” Teachers can see at a glance what every student needs.
Students can continue to progress as they master new concepts, rather than having to stay in step with others their age. For example, Alison says two students in kindergarten last year “maxed out of all the kindergarten skills. And so we started teaching them the first-grade skills. And this year they’re doing second-grade skills.”
Fridays look different. Alison gives the teachers the day for planning purposes, and then she and the assistants run things. “We have special guests. We’ve been having STEAM activities, such as Brainy Bots. We’ve had Little Medical School, we’ve had Bricks 4 Kidz,” she says. They also go on field trips, such as swimming lessons, botanical gardens, the bank, a play, and the airport.
On one summer camp field trip, a mom brought her older daughter, two cousins, and two grandkids—six extra people. “We were just so happy,” Alison says. “We want family involvement. That’s our thing.”
All 20 students use Florida’s Empowerment Scholarship ESA program to pay for Star Lab. Each student receives $8–9,000 in the ESA, which doesn’t quite cover the school’s $11,500 tuition. But Alison doesn’t charge families anything above the ESA.
Launching a microschool that offers individualized learning in public housing is an innovative way to meet the needs of disadvantaged kids. However, reaching this point required navigating a bureaucratic nightmare. The city demanded a full sprinkler system, a $130,000 requirement that nearly killed the school in its infancy. Mandates like this are aimed at keeping kids safe in much larger schools where many classrooms are far from exits. Star Lab is located on the ground floor, and both rooms have doors that go directly outside.
Without the sprinkler system, Star Lab’s enrollment was capped at five students, which was unsustainable. Alison spent months researching alternate fire code compliance paths and found a solution that would have required just a $75 door handle upgrade. The city refused to budge. Fortunately, a local foundation provided the needed funding to the housing authority, and Alison installed the system.
“I felt like such a failure last year, only having five kids,” Alison admits. Then she attended a Black Minds Matter conference and spoke with other founders. “Person after person would say, ‘I started with six, and now I have 30.’ ‘I started with two, and one of them was mine.’ One of them even said, ‘I started with nobody. I just said, it’s open, and I sat there.’”
That experience gave Alison the encouragement and confidence she needed. “My biggest piece of advice is just get started,” she now says. “Once you start, you can iterate, you can experiment, you can improve, and you can take pictures and promote. And then people are going to kind of see what you’re offering.”