A mother walked into The Treehouse in Utah last spring with her oldest son. Her two younger kids were already enrolled. She told Jennie Jones, the founder and director, that she wanted her oldest to do a trial day. Then she said why:
"I see all the cool things you guys are doing on Prism, and I just think he would love it here."
She had never set foot in the building for her older boy. She didn't need a tour. She had been watching, week after week, what her younger kids' days actually looked like — the projects, the conversations, the small moments — and at some point that became enough evidence to bring her third kid in.
This is what a year of Prism looks like, in two of the microschools that have been with us the longest. I asked Jennie and Lauren Umlauf, who directs The Dandelion Project, a hybrid program in Philadelphia, to tell me what changed. Not in marketing language. In the actual texture of their work.
What follows is mostly theirs.
Before, it was anxious energy
Both of them started in the same place. Photos on phones, notes in Slack, a shared doc cobbled together before parent meetings, a yearbook scramble in May. Lauren put it directly:
"I think it cost us more in anxious energy — that we didn't have a streamlined system so some kids had more data collected than others, we weren't capturing so many important experiences, and we were losing it all if it wasn't saved outside of Slack."
Jennie had the same shape of problem from a different angle. Families using different funding programs were asking her for evidence of learning, and she was scrolling through a camera roll mixed with photos of her own kids and "random stuff my own kids take photos of" to find it. She was helping each family upload to a different platform.
"Prism has made it easy to find evidence by kid, by subject, and even better, the parents can find it all themselves. It took me out of the funding reporting totally."
That last sentence is the one I want to sit on. Documentation in a microschool isn't just an internal practice; it's the connective tissue between the school and a growing patchwork of ESA programs, state evaluators, and family expectations. The thing that had been costing Jennie hours of her week is now something parents handle themselves, because the record is theirs to begin with.
A rhythm, not a project
Neither of them describes Prism as something they sit down to "do." It's worked its way into the texture of the day.
At The Treehouse, four or five facilitators take photos throughout the week. Then, while waiting for kids to be picked up at the end of the day, they post.
"It adds 15 minutes to the end of the day at most. As the director, I tend to do some longer text-based posts once a month, sharing my observations of growth I have seen in certain kids or in each cohort. I also check the number of posts around then and let our team know which kids need more posts in their portfolio. It helps us keep a rhythm of checking in with kids."
At Dandelion, every facilitator documents almost daily. Lauren makes a point of catching the unfacilitated stuff too — kids gathered at the LEGO table, a small group playing Spit on an outside trip, three kids in a side conversation that turned into something. The offering gets captured, but so does the in-between, which is where so much of the actual development happens.
What they can see now
This is the part I find most interesting, because it isn't really about a tool. It's about what becomes available to notice when you have a sustained practice of looking.
Lauren runs an annual Comedy Club where students write, film, and edit a sketch comedy. She has done this for years. This year was the first time she captured what surrounded it:
"I documented so many behind the scenes activities that are as important as the writing and filming — how the kids designed a casting process, when the group met and decided to take a big left turn, etc. There are so many soft skills — collaboration (listening, communication, considering equity and empathy in design) that I recorded this year that I haven't in years prior."
The product was the same as in past years. What changed was that the process became legible. The negotiation, the equity work, the moment a group of kids voluntarily redirected their own project: all of it now sits in their portfolios, where before it would have evaporated by Monday.
Jennie tells a quieter version of the same story. She has a learner who has resisted writing for two years. One day, working on a soda experiment, he started writing the first letter of each ingredient on a recipe card.
"I quickly caught a photo of his recipe card, but the part of the story I got to share later in Prism was the fun conversation he and I had. I shared how awesome it was to see him writing and asked if it had gotten easier for him. He said, no, it's still hard. I'm just trying my best. I loved hearing that growth and shared it on Prism, because you wouldn't know that from his faint letters on his card."
You would not know it from the photo. You would not know it from a writing sample. You would have to be there, and then you would have to write it down. That is the practice. The platform doesn't replace it; it gives it somewhere to go.
What parents experience
The downstream effect, in both schools, is a different relationship with the families they serve. Lauren describes Prism as a way of supporting parents as homeschoolers, because Dandelion is a hybrid program where families are responsible for their end-of-year portfolios. Prism is co-creating that record with them in real time, instead of leaving it for the last week of June.
Jennie put the trust piece simply:
"My families that use funding loved the ease of pulling up their portfolios for reporting, and I feel like the parents know their kids are seen and known here."
Seen and known
That's the line I keep coming back to. It's the thing a microschool is actually selling, and it has been almost impossible to make legible from the outside. A year of consistent documentation is one of the few things I've watched make it legible.
What's still missing
Neither of them is finished telling me what they want.
Lauren wants easier bulk photo downloads in different categories, and the ability to capture video and audio, including stuff the kids make themselves. Jennie wants a yearbook integration; her kids decided to build one this year and the process of moving photos out of Prism into another platform was clunky. Both of these are on our list. The video and audio piece in particular is something we're building toward thoughtfully, because how learner-created media gets handled has real implications for portability and ownership, and we want to get those right the first time.
Honest feedback from people doing the work is more useful to me than any roadmap exercise I could run alone.
What comes next
Jennie ended her responses with this, almost in passing:
"I'm also working on building an ESA-approved hybrid program so families can enroll part-time in-person and track learning at home on Prism. I'm really excited to use Prism to roll that out."
A year ago, that sentence wouldn't have made sense. The infrastructure for it didn't exist. Now it does, and a microschool leader in Utah is building on top of it.
That's a more accurate picture of where this is going than anything I could write on my own. The movement isn't going to be defined by a thesis. It's going to be defined by what educators like Jennie and Lauren build, and what becomes possible because the documentation underneath is finally good enough to hold the work, make it visible, and communicate its value to a diverse ecosystem of stakeholders.
