Colleen Hroncich
The 4th Annual National Hybrid Schools Conference is taking place today at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, so it’s fitting to feature a hybrid school this week.
After a 17-year career as a public school teacher, Sarah VanDerVliet wanted something different. She was an ag teacher, so she ran the Future Farmers of America (FFA) chapter along with the school’s farming and agricultural programs. Sarah and her husband have a farm, and they were trying to figure out a way for her to be home more and working on the farm. They toured a farm in Nebraska in early 2022, and the conversation landed on homeschooling and the hybrid model the family used. “We just talked the whole way home and thought maybe this is something we want to do,” Sarah recalls. “It was just crazy how instantly it was like, OK, I’m going to start a school. That’s what we’re going to do.”
Sarah got a group of parents together who she knew had been considering homeschooling or were already homeschooling. “We just started brainstorming ideas, like what does this look like? How do we do this? And then it basically was God-led from there,” she says. She completed the rest of the school year along with her summer FFA duties. Buffalo Christian Homeschool Academy opened in Colton, SD, in September 2022, just six months after Sarah learned about the hybrid model.
The school meets two days a week in a converted farmhouse on the family farm. There are currently 31 students ranging from first through twelfth grade. Parents handle math and English at home since those are subjects where skill levels can vary a lot. Doing them at home allows kids to go at their own pace in a smaller setting. The agriculture aspect is a big part of Buffalo Christian, so they learn about animals, including how they’re processed for food, gardening, beekeeping, dairy, and more. Sarah also covers social studies, history, science, spelling, book reports, and reading.
They start the day with prayer, pledge, and devotion. Then Sarah does a group lesson—recently they’ve been learning about egg processing and fermentation. She incorporates a lot of hands-on projects. For example, with the fermentation, they did an experiment to watch how yeast and water reacted with various grasses and starches that the kids found on the farm. Then they split into smaller groups that might include history lessons, science experiments, or working on book reports. Sarah has an aide who works with one group while she’s working with the other. They also have time for electives, which include activities such as leatherworking, wood burning, and engraving with a GlowForge.
“I know it kind of sounds crazy, but it’s kind of like a hodgepodge,” Sarah says with a chuckle. “We group accordingly. Sometimes it’s K‑4, sometimes it’s K‑5, sometimes it’s 5–8, sometimes it’s 7–12, sometimes it’s K‑12. It really just depends on what needs to be accomplished. We kind of divvy accordingly. So every day is a little different.” Each day she creates a schedule of what they need to accomplish, and they just roll through it.
One of Sarah’s biggest challenges was incorporating FFA into her school. “If you want to be part of FFA, you have to take an ag education class because they’re intracurricular, so it all goes together—your classroom, your FFA—and then there’s a record book portion on the kids’ projects,” she explains. That meant she would have to drive them to the public school twice a day because one class met in the morning and the other in the afternoon. Since her degree is in ag education, she talked with the state program leaders, and they allowed Sarah to start the first homeschool chapter in South Dakota.
Sarah says her kids love being part of the hybrid school. She’s always told them they can go back to the public school at any time, if they want, but they aren’t interested, even though they didn’t have a bad experience at school. “I think they just love being home,” she says. “We’re a farming family, so there’s always stuff to do. And the kids are helping on the farm so much, and it’s just really made our family life healthier. It’s made our family unit stronger. And so I think the kids love that, and they love the freedom and flexibility.”