Colleen Hroncich
“I got into education sort of by accident,” says Sarah Pevehouse, founder of Apogee Dripping Springs microschool in Texas. After attending an adult summer camp for photographers, she started working with the organizer’s summer camps for kids. That was her first experience with private, intentionally curated educational experiences.
Sarah’s husband was in the military, so they moved around quite a bit. She was a substitute teacher in various military base schools, and she thought she wanted a different path for her daughters when it was time for them to go to school. When her oldest was nearing kindergarten age, she started asking questions on a Facebook community page. “About 25 comments in, there was a grandmother who made a comment about her grandchildren really thriving in a Waldorf school,” she recalls. “I’d never heard of Waldorf before.”
She looked into it and realized Waldorf was a good match for their family. In addition to enrolling her daughters in a Waldorf school, Sarah enrolled in a Waldorf teacher training program. “I was just all in on Waldorf education and did that until my oldest daughter was leaving the K–8 program that she’d been in. And I had worn all kinds of hats at that point,” she explains. “I’d been a teacher, I’d been an administrator, an enrollment director, even just a board member, and an over-volunteering parent.”
With her daughter approaching the end of her Waldorf days, Sarah couldn’t find a next step—something she thought would prepare her girls with the skills they would need to be successful in young adulthood. By this point, her husband had retired from the Marine Corps, and they were living in central Texas. “I can’t be the only person who doesn’t really want to take my child from having been in a small, very intentional learning environment and put her in the public school,” she realized.
Plus, the local high school was overcrowded, and there were many homeschoolers in the area looking for other high school options. “I felt confident that if I tried to genuinely figure out how to solve this problem for my family, I would actually be solving this problem for a lot of families,” she says. “And that’s exactly what happened.”
As she was designing her program, Sarah surveyed people who work with high school graduates to learn what gaps they were seeing. The answers were consistent: lack of initiative, weak communication skills, and students who didn’t know how to show up prepared—not just with clothing and basic necessities, but with the right mindset and readiness to be good team players. “I realized that what I wanted to do was create a program that was heavy in life skills and character development, as well as educational aspects, too, of developing these young people,” she says.
Sarah launched Apogee Dripping Springs in August 2024 with three students—the early adopters who were willing to take a chance. “I had a lot of people on my interest list,” she says. “I had 25 to 30 people at every info session I hosted.” But many were cautious and wanted to see how it went before jumping in.
Now in its second year, Apogee Dripping Springs is a full-time Monday through Friday program with 14 students, plus nine additional homeschoolers who participate in Toastmasters for Teens on Mondays. They currently meet in a space she leases from a local church. “It’s a beautiful room. We’re on the corner of the building, and so two walls are just nothing but windows,” says Sarah. Her setup feels more like a living room than a classroom, with couches, bookshelves, a big whiteboard, high-top tables, and rolling chairs. The kids can also take their independent work outside whenever they want—the church has a great outdoor space with a big yard and a wraparound patio with seating.
The day starts with “prime time,” which Sarah describes as “just doing activities to prime their brain for learning. So kind of blending my Waldorf background in with regular educational stuff.” She has them start with 5–10 minutes of juggling, which she says helps get both hemispheres of their brains turned on, followed by some logic activities, such as puzzles and mazes. Prime time happens before the school day begins, and Sarah says, “I love that I actually have students that arrive before they need to,” so they can participate.
From there, it moves into goal-setting, growth mindset work, project-based learning tied to a rotating theme, and independent study time using online platforms for core academics. In addition to the Toastmasters on Mondays, there are special classes on different days. On Fridays, a private chef comes in for three hours of culinary instruction in the church kitchen.
Sarah has also developed partnerships with two local gyms. “We do CrossFit twice a week, and we do jiu-jitsu twice a week,” she explains. “I believe that hard physical movement is really important for teenagers and their developing bodies, especially when it comes to metabolizing and processing emotions, which are very high in teenagers.”
One unique aspect of the Apogee Dripping Springs model is its use of the community as a classroom. Students pick topics that interest them, and Sarah connects them with local people who do that for a living. “I feel really strong about getting these kids in front of people who are living in their zone of genius and doing the thing that they’re interested in or researching about,” she explains. “We do the typical thing where we will look things up online, maybe watch a YouTube video, or read something about it. But then the ultimate goal is to get them in front of someone who’s actually doing it so they can see it in real life.”
The school is waitlisted, and she’s intentionally not expanding. After enrollment doubled between year one and year two, the dynamic shifted in ways that gave her pause. “I kind of saw there was like a loss of that vulnerability when the group doubled,” she says. “The goal here isn’t really to just make it as big as possible. The goal is really about the potency of the experience.”
Texas is currently launching Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), which provide state funding that families can use to pay for private school tuition and other educational expenses. Sarah is watching the rollout closely, but she doesn’t expect it to affect them initially because much of the funding will go to children with disabilities, which she generally isn’t equipped to support. Although she has seen great results for kids with ADHD.
Sarah sometimes fields calls from people asking how to build something similar, and she’s happy to help. She recommends figuring out what your community actually needs, but she adds that they should do the thing that genuinely excites them, or else it won’t be sustainable. “Running a school is not like really running a business,” she points out. “You are essentially forming a community.”