Colleen Hroncich
“What are you doing?” former public school teacher Emma Rodriguez asked herself when she realized she wouldn’t send her own kids to her school. It was 2020, and she’d been teaching for seven years at a highly rated school in Dallas, Texas. She started thinking about her future family and what she believed as an educator.
Emma began to dream and pray about how she could do things differently. “How could I come alongside families that maybe want to homeschool for the flexibility, the personalization of it, but just don’t want to transition from mom to teacher?” she wondered. She thought there had to be something between full-time school and full-time homeschooling. “I had no idea there was actually a term for it. It was just my thought,” she says. “As I started doing more research, I figured out there was actually the term of microschool.”
Her husband told her, “Please go live your dream. I’ll take care of you. We’ll figure it out.” She quit teaching in May 2024. After a fall spent planning, she soft-launched Lighthouse Christian Academy in January 2025 with two students—kids of a family she already knew—who happened to have empty daytime space in the after-school STEM program they ran. “They said, here’s your first two kids and here’s your space, ready, go,” she recalls. “Like we believe in you.”
Lighthouse now has 16 students, two additional teachers, and pods spanning kindergarten through middle school. It runs as part of the Prenda network, which supplies curriculum and structure without swallowing her school’s identity. “It wasn’t like you had to buy into it and take on their whole model, or they take a huge percentage of your tuition,” Emma says. “They still allowed me to be me.”
The daily rhythm is distinctly Prenda: a morning Connect meeting, a block called Conquer for core academics, a Collaborate block that rotates monthly between hands-on science and social studies projects, and an afternoon Create block for open-ended challenges—duct tape wallets, paper airplane contests, a nationwide log-cabin-building competition against other Prenda microschools. Kids are out the door by 2 p.m. Fridays are reserved for field trips and elective classes.
“Each kid’s completely personalized. They could be working a grade or two behind or ahead in math or reading. Nobody knows besides them, me, and their parents what they’re working on, and they work at their own pace,” Emma explains. “We set a goal for the end of the year, and they just work towards that goal. So they get to decide what that looks like every day. Now, some of our littles need more guidance than that, but for the most part, they get to kind of choose what that looks like.”
Faith runs through the day rather than being confined to one class. The school works through a catechism curriculum during morning meeting, complete with call-and-response memory work, worship songs, and prayer. “It’s woven throughout our day as far as conversations that we have with kids and our core principles and what we believe in,” says Emma.
Lighthouse recently earned accreditation through a Middle States Association pilot program, which converted its students from homeschoolers into private school students in the state’s eyes. This made them eligible for the private-school amount (around $10,000) in the new Texas Education Freedom Account scholarship program, rather than the smaller homeschool allotment ($2,000).
Although Lighthouse is pretty new, Emma already has would-be microschool founders reaching out to her for advice. She encourages them to embrace the unknown, figure it out as they go, and connect with others on the same journey. “The day-to-day is so beautiful, but the business and actually getting it up off the ground can feel really daunting,” she tells them. “But it’s worth the risk. It’s worth it all.”
