A Note From Our Founder
Picture a greenhouse in early spring—nothing inside looks like much yet, but if you know what you’re looking at, you can already see the shape of what’s coming. I’ve spent my whole life around that kind of becoming: teaching as a child with a stack of borrowed teacher’s guides and a room full of dolls, then Sunday school, then youth mentoring, then over a decade homeschooling my own two children. Along the way I kept meeting bright, capable kids struggling inside classrooms that were never built to notice them—not because any teacher failed them, but because a system built for scale rarely has room for one child’s actual needs. Nourishment their bodies were starving for. Structure nobody had time to give. I kept thinking: somebody should build something different. It’s part of why I chose to homeschool my own children in the first place—I wanted them to have a safe space to bloom, without having to fight for room to grow the way God intended.
A few years ago, a mom from my church started asking if I’d ever considered opening a microschool. I said absolutely not. But the question kept coming, my husband kept telling me God was putting these people in front of me for a reason, and then one day I heard the Holy Spirit’s voice—clear as a bell. I was to build it. In that same moment I remembered my great-grandmother telling me, “You will be a teacher one day,” and my mother’s own quiet dream of a school she never lived to build. They had spoken it long before I was ready to hear it. The Holy Spirit simply finished the sentence.
This school is breathed from the heart of God, for His people and for this generation—not just any school, but a hybrid one, rooted partly at home and partly in the greenhouse we build together. A greenhouse doesn’t leave a seedling to the mercy of whatever conditions come; it shelters, it warms the soil, it tends closely until what’s growing inside is strong enough for the world outside. That’s what I want for every child who walks through our doors: room to bloom, not rushed, just tended until they become exactly who they were made to be.

Chanthany DericoFounder & Lead Cultivator, The Greenhouse School

About Chanthany
- 27 years of experience in childcare, across various roles
- 11 years as a homeschool parent to her own two children
- Servant leader with Sidewalk Sunday School