Meg Pileggi spent six years as a Marine Corps officer before she founded Collective Leadership Academy, a hybrid microschool for homeschool families in Kinston, North Carolina. In this conversation she describes a program built around relationship first. Monday learning days happen out in the community: at the barn, on Meals on Wheels routes, on family field trips. Older students teach younger ones. A student-run foster closet supplies local families in need. And a lot of the growth she pays attention to shows up on the playground, in how kids treat each other, not on any test.

We talk about the kitchen-table moment that reshaped how she thinks about homework, why she cares more about how a child treats their neighbor than how they score, and what it looks like to keep families together instead of sending kids away for thirty-five  ...