Today we’d like to introduce you to Marissa Hess.
Hi Marissa, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
I began my career as a teacher in 2005 and spent 10 years in private and public schools in the US and around the world. In 2015, I set out to provide a curated education for my children as I felt that they needed differentiated education and didn’t fit into a proverbial box that the traditional educational system expected. In addition to desiring differentiated education, I felt that there was also a tremendous amount of time wasted each day, and raising global citizens that can spend time learning in other countries was not also something feasible within the traditional school schedule. In the fall of the 2015 school year, I began to homeschool my children and then began helping other friends by teaching their children core content a few days per week. As such, in this way, my friends were able to have academic support for their children while also curating an education that felt authentic and meaningful to their individual families. Over the next five years, word spread about what I was doing at the Urban Cottage. I found myself refusing to add twenty or more students every year due to a lack of space and the fact that I had no additional staff. As a result, I began looking for a commercial property and began the process of turning my tiny Urban Cottage into a larger, more flexible facility that would utilize additional professional educators and be able to support even more homeschooling families. In January of 2020, I located a spot within a short bike ride from my home that provided an ideal location to grow. I took over the lease in March, and then, within weeks, my business began to receive dozens of emails from families that had suddenly been thrust into crisis schooling due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With a few of our fundamental educational philosophies being that we wanted to curate individual educations for children in extremely small groups of students to teachers, our little Urban Cottage became a perfect microcosm of what families were looking for to support their families in light of a newly (publicly exposed) fractured educational culture.
Families were looking for exactly our type of micro group education, and we had already been doing this exact model for five years! We were suddenly given the incredible privilege of supporting dozens of families, whether they would utilize our services throughout the pandemic or had been homeschooling for years. In fact, many of our clients would find themselves enjoying their family’s new transition to homeschooling and desire to continue for the foreseeable future.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
As with most small businesses in their first years of starting up, the last eight years have been a consistent flow of transitions as we seek to meet the needs of children and families. The Covid era accelerated those transitions, but it also provided a group of families that were looking for more short-term support as they traversed a time of uncertainty in their children’s education. This provided a new set of clients that had different goals, philosophies, and needs than our previous clients had typically wanted. This gave us the ability to grow our business in the consulting and private tutoring aspects. Since then, we have yet again transitioned back into providing more curated core content classes for homeschooling families while also continuing to provide consulting and private tutoring to families looking to curate specific concepts or methods (i.e., dyslexia reading support, global languages, etc.). Our simple goal has always been for children to feel seen and to feel that they are the driver in their education. Creating lifelong learners that truly grasp that and are empowered to pursue knowledge instead of waiting for it to be doled out in the timing and amount someone else feels is best is and always will be the foundation to our program. Regardless of what comes and goes- helping kids not fall through the cracks will always be at the very center of our methodology.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Our business is unique in that families can select content that they find is meaningful to them or to their child and then get access to a beautiful learning environment for a select amount of time based on that focus. It is unusual to have high-caliber academics in a beautiful classroom environment yet be accessible to families without being enrolled full-time. Additionally, many families can see that their children are struggling but have not yet found an environment where they can flourish academically, socially, or mentally. Our extremely low student-to-teacher ratio, small, prepared environment, methodology, and instructors foster a truly unique opportunity for children to thrive in a way families didn’t know was possible.
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
There is a lot of shifting that is happening within the world of education. One of those shifts is that millennial parents were coming into that role in the last few years. As a generation, they are more flexible in their careers, oftentimes have a hybrid work schedule, and are, in general. asking more questions about the historical establishments that are in their life. Their children’s educational journey is no exception to those questions. As such, they are asking educational establishments to flex in a way that other areas of their lives have changed. They value experiences and time with their family in a way that is disruptive to education as we have known it, and they want to know that that education is working for their specific child. This mentality is significant to the shifting that we have only begun to see in education, and innovators are already responding to this reality.
Another significant shift is due to the reality of ESA (Educational Savings Account) legislation being a focus right now around the country and even specifically in the state of Florida. If families are able to have access to educational tax funds that followed their child instead of an institution, it would turn every family into a client. It would empower families to choose the right education for each of their children instead of being stuck in a system that wasn’t working for their child. If they love where they’re at, they can stay! If where they’re at isn’t working, each family can choose to find a place that fits their child’s needs, even if it isn’t a full-time school. This free-market concept begins to encourage schools to provide something for each child instead of providing a one size fits all method and telling families it’s the best they can hope for.
Contact Info:
- Website: urbancottage.us
- Instagram: urbancottageeducational
- Facebook: Urban Cottage Educational Collaborative
- Other: urbancottage.us/summercamps
