Together we envision and map a personal educational approach. The academic plan is based on the teen’s interests while also fulfilling the family’s needs. North Star facilitates this process through discussion and recommendations based on more than two decades of experience.

If the teen is younger than 16, we will help you prepare this plan as a homeschooling proposal for submission to your local superintendent. This is a very straightforward process. Your superintendent’s office will certify you as a homeschooler; this makes leaving school legal for students under age 16.

Each teen member of North Star has an advisory relationship with a member of the Core Staff. Together, teens and advisors imagine and realize goals, track progress, and facilitate tutorials and community connections. This relationship is at the core of the North Star experience.

Advisors meet with teens and their families at least three times per year to envision possibilities and to review achievements. Additional meetings may be scheduled on request. Parental involvement is encouraged. There are many opportunities for parents to be a part of our community.

North Star firmly believes that learning happens everywhere. Please refer to our many methods of facilitating learning on our Learning page.

North Star offers classes, workshops, and tutorials between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, September–May. Our classes represent the interests and passions of our core staff and volunteers, and include a wide range of topics. Most classes have fewer than 10 students.

North Star strives to accommodate all students’ passions and will work to provide tutors or learning experiences in any subject. We provide one-on-one tutorials in a wide range of subjects such as mathematics, foreign languages, guitar, and computer programming. We work to match students’ interests with that of a core staff of caring professionals and a large, extended staff composed of interns, community volunteers, and work-study students from local colleges.

Human beings are learning creatures. We don’t have to persuade babies to be curious and to seek competence and understanding. The same can be true of teenagers. Rather than trying to motivate teenagers, we support their basic human drive to learn and grow. Where obstacles—internal or external—have gotten in the way of this intrinsic drive, we focus on helping teenagers overcome or remove these obstacles.

Conventional wisdom says that children “go to school to learn,” as though learning can only occur in places specially designed for that purpose. We believe that people learn all the time and in all kinds of places. It doesn’t have to look like school or feel like school to be valuable, and it’s not necessary to make distinctions between “schoolwork” and “your own hobbies” or “for credit” and “not for credit.” As one teenager who had recently left school observed, “Everything I do counts now.”

Many young people who are miserable in school—academically or socially—stay because they believe that leaving school will rule out (or at least diminish) the possibility of a successful future. We believe that young people can achieve a meaningful and successful adulthood without going to school. We’ve seen it happen, over and over again.

School success or failure is not necessarily a predictor of a child’s potential for success or failure outside of school. An unmotivated student may become enthusiastic and committed after she’s left school. A student who doesn’t thrive in a classroom environment may become successful when allowed to learn through apprenticeships or in one-on-one tutorials. When we change the approach, the structure, and the assumptions, all kinds of other changes often follow.

It’s not enough to tell kids that we want them to be self-motivated, or that we want them to value learning for its own sake, if the structure of their lives and their educations is actually communicating the opposite message. Voluntary (rather than compulsory) classes, the ability to choose what one studies rather than following a required curriculum, and the absence of tests and grades all contribute to a structure that supports and facilitates intrinsic motivation and self-directed learning.

Most of the time, we can’t truly make sure that young people learn any particular thing—learning just doesn’t work that way. A group of adults can decide that all fifth graders should learn fractions, but when it comes to each individual child’s genuine understanding and retention, we can’t actually make it happen or guarantee that it will happen. As adults, what we can do, however, is try to make things possible for young people—provide access, offer opportunity, figure out what kind of support will be most helpful, do whatever we can to help navigate the challenges and problems that arise.

Too often, education is thought of in terms of preparation: “Do this now, even if it doesn’t feel connected to your most pressing interests and concerns, because later on you’ll find it useful.” We believe that helping teenagers to figure out what seems interesting and worth doing right now, in their current lives, is also the best way to help them develop self-knowledge and experience at figuring out what kind of life they want and what they need to do or learn in order to create that life. In other words, it’s the best preparation for their futures.