Ariel Maguire gathered together with other moms in her rural area of the Big Island of Hawaii to create a child-centered educational solution for local families. It was late 2021 and the parents realized that nearly two years of pandemic policies had left their kids behind both academically and socially.

There weren't a lot of child care or early-education options nearby. "The closest place to send our kids would be a little over an hour drive each way and it has a huge waitlist," Maguire told me in a recent podcast interview. "We were all struggling because we'd been stuck at home with our kids without community for a couple of years and needed to get back to work."

So Maguire and the other moms decided to build what they couldn't find. They established their program, Kulike Learning Garden, as a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, as well as a private membership association, or PMA, that works legally like a social club to facilitate voluntary association within a cooperative community of shared roles and expectations. They hired an experienced Waldorf teacher, and opened their Waldorf-inspired, child-focused, nature-based microschool on a family farm in January 2022 with about 15 children, ages three to six. Parent volunteers shared in the teaching responsibilities.

Over the following months, the microschool, which cost families $600 a month, flourished. "The kids were all thriving," said Maguire, an accountant and mom of four young girls. "The feedback we were getting was that the kids were doing so much better at home because of this new routine. A lot of their behaviors that we were experiencing during the pandemic had calmed down. The kids were having a blast."

Then, in November 2022, officials from the Hawaii Department of Human Services showed up on the farm property. "They were very Men in Black style," recalled Maguire. "They had glasses on, masks on, multiple cars. A representative from the Attorney General's office was there, and they were interrogating us, really making us out to seem like we were doing something really wrong, but we truly felt that we weren't."