How We Built a Student-Centered School Before We Had the Systems for It

What the first weeks of ISLA taught me about school design

In 2015, ISLA Academy was not yet the school people know today.

We had one class of about twelve students, ranging in age from seven to sixteen.

Much of the day happened on the patio of our Cabarete campus. There was no mature operating model, no refined six-week unit cycle, no formal project planning tools, no clearly defined core skills, and none of the systems that now allow the school to function across multiple campuses.

There was an idea. There were students. There were families willing to trust something new. And there was the daily pressure of making the idea real.

When I look back at those early weeks, I do not see a polished school model. I see something more useful for founders: the difference between a philosophy and a practice.

Lots of people have a philosophy of education. They believe children should be known. They believe learning should be meaningful. They believe students should have agency. They believe school should develop the whole person, not just produce grades.

Those beliefs matter. But they do not become a school until they survive Tuesday morning.

In those first weeks, we were trying to answer a deceptively simple question: What does a normal day look like when every child is on an individual learning path?

The answer was not a schedule copied from another school. It had to be built from the experience of the students in front of us.

Some students began the day with surfing, exercise, extra rest, or additional study time. That was not a gimmick. It was an early expression of a deeper belief: students learn better when they begin to take ownership of their own rhythms, choices, and readiness.

From there, students moved into unit projects. The theme of one early unit was culture. Instead of assigning the same narrow topic to every student, we began with shared discussion, generated questions, and then allowed students to pursue areas that genuinely interested them.

That changed the energy of the work.

Students researched the Korean War, ancient Chinese inventions, universal language, and other topics that would never have appeared together in a conventional pacing guide. From the outside, that might have looked messy. Inside the learning, it was coherent. The common thread was not identical content. It was the development of research, writing, citation, communication, project design, and critical thinking.

That distinction became foundational for us.

A school does not need every student to learn the same fact at the same time in order to be rigorous. It needs clarity about the skills students are developing and the evidence that shows growth.

In traditional school models, content often becomes the organizing principle. At ISLA, we began to see skills, habits, and ownership as the deeper architecture. Content still mattered, but it was not the only path to seriousness.

Students selected topics, designed projects, created action plans, built calendars, and helped define what excellent work would look like. They were not simply completing assignments because a teacher said so. They were learning how to shape work, judge quality, revise, and present something meaningful.

Of course, that level of freedom came with confusion. Students were not always sure what to do next. They hit creative obstacles. They needed coaching. They had to learn how to ask better questions, how to use feedback, how to manage time, and how to keep going when the next step was not obvious.

That difficulty was not a failure of the model. It was the point.

If we want students to become leaders, creators, and problem-solvers, they need practice inside situations where the answer is not handed to them immediately. They need support, but not rescue. They need structure, but not a script.

The same principle shaped the rest of the day.

Students created early forms of student government because recess and shared life created real community problems to solve. They participated in cooking, STEM, volleyball in Spanish, literature circles, writing workshops, and individualized math.

Lunch was not treated as a pause from education. It was part of educating the whole child. Students and teachers ate together, cleaned together, played together, and built the kind of trust that makes real learning possible.

That early school was imperfect. It changed constantly. We were planning, revising, improvising, and learning out loud.

But the heart of the model was already there.

• Students should be known.

• Learning should be meaningful.

• Freedom should be paired with responsibility.

• Teachers should build trust, not just deliver lessons.

• Assessment should help students understand themselves, not merely sort them.

• School should prepare students to think, communicate, create, collaborate, and keep learning long after the teacher steps away.

  
  

Over the years, ISLA built stronger systems around those beliefs. We developed clearer unit structures, better planning tools, more consistent communication, stronger assessment practices, and operational structures that allowed the model to scale. But the systems came later.

That matters for anyone trying to start a school.

Founders often think they need every system perfected before they begin. They want the complete curriculum map, the finished handbook, the polished schedule, the perfect assessment framework, the full staff training model, and the long-term operational plan.

Those things matter. Eventually, they matter a lot.

But a school does not begin as a binder of systems. It begins as a set of lived commitments. The first test is whether those commitments can become real in the daily experience of students.

In the beginning, the question is not "Do we have every tool we will someday need?" The question is "Can we create an environment where the thing we believe about children is actually true?"

If the answer is yes, then the next job is to build systems that protect that environment as the school grows.

That is the purpose of good systems. They are not there to make a school more bureaucratic. They are there to preserve the original promise under more complex conditions.

At ISLA, every useful system we built came from that need. We were not trying to become more conventional. We were trying to make our unconventional commitments sustainable.

The tools improved. The structure became clearer. The community grew. But the goal remained the same: to build a school where students pursue meaningful work, develop independence, learn across ages and disciplines, build strong relationships with adults, and become owners of their own learning.

Looking back, I am grateful that the first version of ISLA was not overbuilt.

It forced us to pay attention.

It forced us to design from real students rather than abstract plans.

It forced us to learn which parts of the vision were essential and which parts were just ideas we had not tested yet.

And it taught me one of the most important lessons I know about school leadership:

You do not build a great school by choosing between vision and systems. You build it by living the vision first, then creating the systems that help it last.