"I would rather the learning make them better human beings." with Jill Haskins of Kainos Microschool

What We See is a conversation series across Indie Education. Microschools, homeschool families, and hybrid programs talking about what they're actually doing, how they know it's working, and what the metrics miss. In this episode, Tomis talks with Jill Haskins, founder of Kainos Microschool in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Jill is a former public school teacher who said she'd never homeschool, then did; said she'd never pursue accreditation, then joined the first Middle States pilot for microschools. Kainos started as 11 kids in her living room in January 2025 and grew to 25 students, a staff of four, and a waitlist of 28 by that fall, operating out of a former vape shop in a strip mall. She describes quiet, focused mornings driven by planner checklists her students love; why her team whites out the grade levels on assessment reports before kids ever see them; the "side quests" her students named themselves; and what changed for a seventh grader whose previous school had decided to stop teaching him to read.