Friday Feature: Collective Leadership Academy

Colleen Hroncich

In most areas of life, when something isn’t working, we look for a better option. In K–12 education, though, children are assigned to public schools based on where they live—and if that school isn’t a good fit, the child is generally seen as the problem. School choice is changing that by expanding access to alternative learning environments. But educational freedom changes lives only if parents and teachers know what options exist, which is why Cato’s Friday Feature highlights the schools, policies, and organizations bringing those choices within reach.

When Meghan Pileggi left the Marine Corps in 2020, she was ready for a change. A former comptroller and financial management officer who had spent time at the Pentagon and deployed overseas, she wanted more time with her children. She started homeschooling and loved it. Eventually, several factors inspired her to create a school. 

For starters, one of her children is autistic, and Meghan didn’t feel equipped to homeschool her. But Meghan also wasn’t comfortable with the options available in the local public schools. North Carolina’s school choice programs offered another possibility: scholarship funding could help her hire experts who could support her daughter’s needs. 

Her own educational experience was the other key factor. Meghan struggled with standardized testing, scoring near the bottom on the SAT despite later attending college on an NCAA scholarship and graduating with academic honors. 

“Our school is kind of built around what I would have wanted as a student,” she says. The result is Collective Leadership Academy in Kinston, North Carolina. The K–12 private school operates on a hybrid schedule. Mondays are family learning days, when students learn with their families through activities such as exploring a hobby, visiting a historical site, or learning on their family farm. Tuesdays are devoted to assigned academic work at home. Students come to campus the rest of the week. “Wednesday and Friday are core academic days, and then Thursday is an elective-only day,” Meghan says. 

“Friday afternoon, we do a program called Young Marines,” she adds, “which is a nationwide youth program that teaches leadership, discipline, teamwork, and focuses on instilling good habits to encourage living a healthy, drug-free lifestyle.” 

The school currently enrolls 32 full-time students, with two additional homeschoolers joining on Thursdays. Rather than traditional grade-level classrooms, students learn in multi-age “family learning pods.” Meghan says the goal is to keep independent-study groups around a six-to-one student-teacher ratio and create an environment that feels more like a homeschool family gathered around a table than a conventional classroom. 

Peer leadership is a deliberate part of that model. Before asking an adult for help, students are encouraged to ask another student. “If there’s another peer who’s already mastered fractions, they get kind of excited to be like, ‘Oh, let me help you, I just learned about this. I want to show you how to do this,’” Meghan explains. “We give them the opportunity to lead their peers rather than robbing them of that opportunity.”

Instead of conventional report cards, Collective Leadership Academy uses a portfolio system where parents, teachers, and students document learning experiences and reflections. Those include traditional academics, but they can also capture learning that happens while caring for animals, making art, playing strategy games, cooking, or pursuing other interests. Older students can use the accumulated information to create transcripts. 

For Meghan, that broader picture matters because she has seen students struggle when their abilities aren’t reflected in conventional measures. “It’s just crazy how we’ve been able to see kids really come out of their shells in ways that you wouldn’t see in that traditional school setting,” she says. 

Affordability is another priority. Every student at the school has received a North Carolina Opportunity Scholarship, according to Meghan, and she estimates around 80 percent qualify for the program’s highest funding tier based on income. Students with special needs can also receive education savings accounts, which the school uses to bring in specialists such as speech therapists and tutors. 

Meghan is already helping other people interested in launching similar schools. Her advice is simple: “Honestly, it’s just one step at a time. You just pick up one and put it in front of the other.” 

Source: https://www.cato.org/blog/friday-feature-collective-leadership-academy