Microschools see growing interest amid COVID-19

Weekdays Micro-schools CEO Shauna Causey joins Yahoo Finance’s Akiko Fujita to discuss how micro-schools are becoming an alternative to virtual education amid COVID-19.

Video Transcript

AKIKO FUJITA: New York City is delaying the start of in-person classes yet again. Mayor Bill de Blasio saying elementary schools now won't reopen until September 29, while students won't return to middle and high school classrooms until October 1. The city joining a long list of school districts that have extended their remote learning, and that has prompted a lot of parents to consider turning to micro-schools.

Let's bring in our next guest. Shauna Causey is the CEO of Weekdays, which helps support 100 micro-schools in four different states. And Shauna, it's great to have you on today. Let's start by talking about what exactly a micro-school is. We've certainly heard the term, become familiar with it over the last six months. But walk us through how it works and who teaches them.

SHAUNA CAUSEY: Yeah, you're right. It's really a new term that we've been using a lot more since the pandemic started. And really, this is the effort of community coming together to support each other, and it's really taken off since the pandemic, as we've all seen.

And usually, it's a group of anywhere between three to four, up to eight children within the educator's home or the parent's home. And sometimes they're co-ops that are taught by parents switching. A lot of times they're getting support and help from former teachers or different people who either have child care experience or teaching experience.

AKIKO FUJITA: So these teachers aren't necessarily accredited, do I have that right?

SHAUNA CAUSEY: They're-- well, a lot of the teachers actually are, because they have formal experience. But the programs themselves actually do not need to be accredited. If you think about it a little bit like a tutor or an after-school program, these have really been extended, and now they're full-day programs to support remote learning, which is happening in most-- most states across the country right now.

AKIKO FUJITA: So Shauna, we should point out that you founded this company at the beginning of the year, right before the pandemic. And now you've got a wait list of 9,500 parents. The idea of micro-schools isn't necessarily new, but help us understand how you have seen this momentum really take off over the last six months.

SHAUNA CAUSEY: Yeah, so really as soon as the pandemic hit, we started really hearing from educators, and hundreds and hundreds of them almost overnight. They were worried about going back to school, back to their child care center. And if you look at a lot of the child care centers are small businesses themselves, we're seeing somewhere around 25% of those shutter in our communities.

So if you think about the child care crisis that we had before the pandemic now just getting worse, and teachers are desperate, parents are desperate, you know, children are really in a tough position. So really, we started to hear from educators first. And then parents, over the summer, I think were really trying to figure out what are they going to do during this time, and are schools going to reopen. There was a lot of uncertainty.

And so about three months ago when schools started announcing their programs, and it started to be clear that there wasn't an end in sight soon for the pandemic, we just became sort of the-- the go-to overnight. And we actually have a text line, so parents started texting us, asking for options, and that's really how we communicate with parents and educators. We're a tech company. So we just started getting thousands and thousands of texts. And it started rolling across the country as we saw these states announce their plans to be remote or a hybrid remote, in-person.

AKIKO FUJITA: So how does a business work? I mean, do parents need to sign-- do they have to pay a fee to get onto the platform? Do you take a cut from the schools that are actually created? How does that all work?

SHAUNA CAUSEY: Yeah, so we-- sometimes people call us, like, the Airbnb of child care and school support. And I think that analogy plays-- plays well for a lot of what we offer. We are a platform, a tech company, and a marketplace to find really amazing local neighborhood schools.

Where it's different is we actually have a quality bar. We do background checks. We vet every single educator on our platform. So that's where maybe we're a little bit different than Airbnb, because we only work with about 15% of the educators who are interested in working with us because we have a high quality bar.

So the way that it works is there's no cost on either side to sign up. We start helping you with liability insurance, with all of the paperwork you need. On the parents' side, you can go to our website and find a local neighborhood micro-school.

If there's not already one in your neighborhood, you can kick-start one, and we will come alongside and help find an educator, help find other parents. And then what we do is we have a service fee similar to a platform like Airbnb or Rover, and so that's just added on to the cost. And so we really make our money back when schools are successful, up and running, when child care programs are successful, up and running, that's when we're able to make the business work.

AKIKO FUJITA: And Shauna, we've seen a number of companies step up to subsidize child care and learning, especially given how a lot of their employees are now juggling having to deal with remote learning for their kids while also working from home. What kind of conversations have you seen-- have you had with some of these businesses? What kind of growth have you seen on the enterprise front?

SHAUNA CAUSEY: Yeah. So one of the criticisms that is a really big conversation right now is just can everyone afford this? Is it available to everyone? And as we know, this sector was hit almost as bad or worse, arguably worse, than any other sector when the pandemic hit as far as just being unprepared.

So the bright spot for me is seeing businesses, even nonprofits, coming and partnering with us. Some don't have any money to give. Some are subsidizing. They're moving something like a gym membership line item over to child care this year to support child care and school support. Sometimes they're adding a new line item to their-- to their HR costs.

And so we're seeing this across-- we're in conversations with about a dozen companies right now that are Fortune 500's. We've got some already in place with hospitals. And then we've got one nonprofit that is fully subsidizing a micro-school for their team and their students. So we're kind of seeing across the board a bright spot where companies are jumping in to help right now.

AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah, certainly a huge growth opportunity there. Shauna Causey, CEO of Weekdays. Great to have you on today.

SHAUNA CAUSEY: Thank you.