Friday Feature: Start Bright Learning Center

Colleen Hroncich

When Valeria Oquendo—known to her students simply as Miss V—finished her education degree in Florida, her plan was to become a public school teacher. But during her internship, she realized that wasn’t the future she wanted. “I didn’t like what I was seeing in the classroom, and I wasn’t happy with all of that,” she says.

She quit the internship, turned her van into a mobile classroom, and started tutoring kids who were struggling. She’d meet families at parks, community centers, and even the grocery store parking lot. Kids were grouped into pods of three, and she could serve nine children a day. 

The parents saw how well their kids were doing academically and emotionally. They began withdrawing them from school and asking Valeria to homeschool them. “They were basically creating the business for me. I didn’t even realize that at the moment,” she recalls. She learned about microschooling and realized that’s what she wanted to do, so she began offering classes for homeschoolers. 

Word spread. “The second year it went a little bit crazier because parents were realizing how the education system is not for everybody,” she says. By August, she was juggling 15 kids each week in her mobile classroom. Then she found a brick-and-mortar space she could use. Now Start Bright Learning Center serves 19 students from kindergarten through fifth grade, plus another nine on Fridays for a science co-op.

The model is intentionally small, and about 90 percent of the families are Hispanic. “We do teach them in English, but you know, the normal day-to-day life, we’re talking Spanish the whole day,” says Valeria, who moved to Florida from Puerto Rico several years ago. “We call it Spanglish. A little bit Spanish, a little bit of English.” 

They start the day with a morning talk. “We have a little conversation of normal topics that can teach us the basics of being a great human being,” Valeria explains. “Then, during the day, if there’s a situation that arises and then they can connect with what we talked about in the morning talk.”

When it comes time for academics, she purposely uses paper and pencils to give kids a break from screens. “We are so overly stimulated right now with technology and TV and the radio and our phones,” she says. “Whenever we find that connection with a pencil and paper nowadays, it’s like soothing and relaxing.” 

Afternoons end with an enrichment hour, which includes hands-on projects. “We have talked about water filters, and we also create our own water filter with a bottle and rocks and sand and see how that works,” says Valeria. After a lesson on communication and how it’s changed throughout history, they made tin-can telephones, which they thought “was the greatest thing.” 

The kids love attending Start Bright. “Their punishment at home could be, you’re not going to see Miss V,” she says, adding that she thinks that’s hilarious. “Other kids will be like happy to have a day off from school, right? But these kids don’t. They want to come back.” She thinks it’s because she’s found a good balance between learning and fun, which has been particularly good for struggling learners. 

The families Valeria serves would not be able to access the program without Florida’s school choice programs. Every Start Bright family uses a scholarship to pay tuition. Before Valeria knew the scholarships existed, parents were paying out of pocket, and she was undercharging because she didn’t know what to ask. Other microschool founders had to tell her. The scholarships enabled her to set sustainable rates without, as she puts it, hurting families’ pockets.

Asked what she’d tell someone considering a similar venture, Valeria emphasizes the importance of helping kids. “I’ll say trust your instinct and don’t give up because yes, the route might seem a little bit difficult, but at the end it’s worth it just to hear the families connecting and how they feel like home and how the students are progressing,” she says. “A lot of these kids, they finally found their place, right? Because we have provided that for them.”