Over a decade spent in education taught me what truly mattered.

My background before WMS starts as an Arizona-certified teacher with a Bachelor's degree in Elementary Education with six years of public-school classroom experience ranging in grades 2-9. During those years, I learned so much about what it means to be an educator, including what I value most within the field. I found myself always wishing for more of the same things: closer collaboration with my students' families, more individualized learning for each student, an emphasis on hands-on and creative activities, and building knowledge that didn't have to have a deadline--all of which were limited in the system I was in and the only system I knew about.

I was blessed to be introduced to TrailblazED and was inspired to start my own microschool, White Mountain Schoolhouse, in 2025. White Mountain Schoolhouse is the program where all of those things I wished for can and do happen on a daily basis. Close family ties, learning at the student's level, tactile activities that bring abstract concepts to life, and ongoing exploration into the topics that interest my learners the most. When you keep a class small and the relationship long, you can teach the child in front of you instead of the 20+ average. In my program, your child is no longer a number to be crowd controlled, but a person to be known.

While my program does allow for and highly values family and learning flexibility, I still do believe in real academic rigor—explicit reading instruction, solid mathematics, writing that gets revised—but I also believe children should still get to be children while they do it. Those two beliefs are not in tension here and the small setting is what allows for both.

Every child deserves at least one adult who truly knows them, and the carefully chosen design of my program allows for that.