Torsten Jostad-Yemm is a smiley high school junior. He has curly, dyed hair and fidgets with a sparkly water at the desk inside the new Radical Minds Academy campus in east Jackson.
His parents work for Grand Teton National Park, but he grew up all over the rural West near other parks, like Denali. That has meant a mix of schools, jumping to different friend groups, and figuring out what doesn’t work.
“I don’t enjoy large, chaotic environments… I learned best in a self-guided environment,” he said. “But I don’t think I’d be able to do that if I didn't have people around me.”
He’s one of a dozen families at the new Jackson academy where he works largely on his own with tutor check-ins. Tuition costs between $1,200 and $2,700 a month.
As homeschooling continues to grow in Wyoming, some parents are finding they don’t have time to teach. Or they need help keeping kids on-track. That’s created a business opportunity for smaller alternative education services like Radical Minds.
Garrett Austen, a former public and private school teacher, started this business in 2018 after founding Teton Tutors to cater to kids who feel they don’t fit into the box in regular school.
“In the beginning, I hated school,” Austen said. “So I became a teacher.”
In 2020, COVID hit, school went online and parents struggled to do their full-time job and keep their kids on-task.
“Because of COVID, I learned that I am not a teacher,” said parent Dana Park.
Some kids at Radical Minds Academy are traveling professional athletes. Or their families live in different countries depending on the month. Park lives year round in Jackson but her son, 11-year-old Everett, needs to travel for medical appointments. He said public school felt “too crowded,” with “too many kids or people around to focus.”
Austen said boutique, tutor-guided homeschool lets parents work as kids earn a high school diploma at their own pace while pursuing their own interests. Since COVID, he’s seen the model take off.
“There've been these popping up in every mountain town and in every city,” he said.
The latest numbers of homeschooled students around Jackson have dropped off since a COVID peak, according to the Wyoming Department of Education. But 70 homeschooled kids in 2024 is still about double pre-pandemic numbers. And statewide homeschoolers have doubled in the last 10 years to nearly 5,000 in 2024, the latest year with data.
Anecdotally, Austen said he’s seen an “exponential” increase in interest in homeschool, online school and other alternatives.
To support parents seeking new options, last year state lawmakers funded a program for families not in public school. Applicants can receive $7,000 per kid, each year. There is no income cap, meaning all families can access the vouchers.
Entrepreneurs like Austen could soon benefit from that new tranche of public funding. It would affect other private educators and extracurricular providers like Taekwondo studios, sports training facilities, and music lesson providers, he said.
But the Education Savings Account (ESA) is held up in court.
A few parents and the Wyoming Education Association – which represents more than 6,000 public educators – are suing. They’re worried private schools could dodge standards of equal admissions, special education services or discriminate against queer students.
Wyoming Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder said the program isn’t about prioritizing one parent group over another.
“It is about giving parents the option for what is best for their child,” she said in a statement to KHOL. She said the legal pause on the ESA is “merely a hurdle in our pursuit of educational freedom, and I will not be deterred from our mission to ensure that every parent has the power to choose the best educational path for their child’s unique future."
Austen said he understands the controversy, especially given his background in public education.
“It's a tough one for me,” he said. “I worry that ESA would just be a tax break for those families who can already afford these things.”
But he doesn’t see Radical Minds Academy as competing with other schools for students.
“I think we offer something a little bit more flexible, a little more precise for the students. And we think we do a better job. The students here get more one-on-one attention.”
How homeschool academies size up is hard to measure without the same data collection and scrutiny of public schools. But the flexibility has let Jostad-Yemm, the junior, start his own business in IT management.
“I spend about four hours a day here on a standard week but that time is flexible,” he said. “And I spend between two to six hours a day doing business stuff.”
Park said this type of high-end homeschool had a more personal impact.
“I honestly feel like Rad Acad has saved our family dynamics,” she said.
