Recently on the LiberatED podcast, Kerry McDonald interviewed Tiffany Blassingame, a fourth-generation educator and the founder of the Ferguson School in Decatur, Georgia. Tiffany’s microschool emphasizes supporting black and brown homeschooling families, and her work has garnered substantial acclaim in both local and national media.
Tiffany started her career as a public school educator in a rural county in South Carolina, where she was raised. From there, Tiffany moved to Atlanta, where she took a job teaching inner-city youth. After 13 years of passionate teaching in Atlanta’s public schools, Tiffany found herself burnt out and exhausted.
After a brief break, Tiffany returned to education, this time entering the world of private schooling. She couldn’t believe how different it was. In public school, Tiffany had upwards of 20 or 30 children in her classroom. In private school, the class sizes were much smaller. This was the change she needed to move to the next level in her career.
Tiffany would go on to serve in several private school administrator roles, including time as an academic dean and assistant head of school. Through this experience, she realized just how important flexible, customized, and privatized education could truly be. Tiffany also noticed how many of the students who really needed the services available via private education couldn’t access it due to high tuition costs. So she decided to create a new kind of space, one that blended the ease and flexibility of private education with more affordability. The Ferguson School was born.
The Ferguson School is uniquely suited to provide options to families who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford private education, serving as both a hybrid homeschool program and a private microschool. Tiffany’s goal has always been to provide high-quality learning that was more affordable and accessible for families, and she has succeeded. Tiffany’s school supports over 20 learners a year, and has special programs and accommodations for gifted and neurodivergent learners built into her curriculum.
Tiffany stated that nearly 40% of the students enrolled in her program had been previously suspended in public school before the age of six for conduct or behavioral issues. Hence, her focus has been on creating a space in which learners can learn emotional regulation and learn in a way that’s conducive to the way they see the world.
Tiffany credits the uptick in homeschooling enrollment and the recent passage of the Georgia Promise Scholarship, a school-choice ESA program designed to support lower-income families, for the Ferguson School’s continued growth. Homeschooling numbers have been steadily increasing since the pandemic, and Georgia in particular has seen quite a significant jump, with nearly 10,000 more homeschool students enrolling in just the 2024–25 school year alone, and an overall increase of 45% within the last decade.
Tiffany has also recently taken the plunge into the world of teacher education, leveraging her passions to create a new learning academy specifically for educators who want to embrace unconventional education and/or create their own learning spaces as she has done.
It’s entrepreneurial teachers like Tiffany who are helping unconventional education flourish in Georgia and beyond.
