Honey Sayler has a passion for helping children learn to read. In addition to her elementary and special education degrees, she’s trained in the Orton-Gillingham method for literacy. So she was frustrated in public schools when students would have to drop into single-digit proficiency levels before being referred for special education. “We had to wait until kids got so far behind before offering intervention, and that just didn’t sit well with me,” she says. “I’m an avid reader. I love literacy. I feel like it unlocks every child’s world.” That passion was the primary motivator behind her decision to open Hope Education Consulting in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
After a 15-year career in public schools, Honey says she was burned out. She had spent time as a resource teacher in elementary and middle school and then worked in case management for a virtual school, which involved assessing students with learning disabilities, writing Individualized Education Programs, and helping the parent coaches with their learning at home. She’d also tutored kids around her kitchen table when her older kids were young.
“I knew I loved kids, and I knew I loved teaching. But my caseload kept growing year after year, and I kept having more cases of violent students with a lack of administrative support,” she recalls. She left teaching in 2019 and was planning to go back to school to pursue a different career. Then the pandemic hit, which gave her the push to pursue a long-time dream.
“I’d always wanted to open a learning center, but I was always just a little bit fearful of taking that risk,” Honey explains. “Slowly over the course of 2020, I started doing virtual lessons. I turned one of our empty spare bedrooms into a mini classroom and started working with folks at home.” After around a year of that, she was able to rent a classroom in a nearby kindergarten-preschool learning center. The following year she found her own space and has been there ever since.
Hope Education Consulting offers a wide variety of services to meet the diverse needs of students. Honey has around 15 employees—all are moms and most are former or current teachers—working part-time, some during typical school hours and others offering after-school support. Each week, she says around 120 to 130 kids come to the center for different services.
On Mondays, five or six teachers provide direct instruction intervention for homeschooled students. “All of our sessions are individualized,” says Honey. “Each child has their own individual progress monitoring and all of their assessments that we typically run through about every nine weeks to determine how we’re going to create their intervention.” Parents can also sign up for consultations with Honey or another one of the special education teachers to learn strategies that may help their children with reading or math.
There’s also a drop-off project-based learning program called Homeschool Connections. Students arrive at 9 and get picked up at 2:45 and they have a day of STEM-focused activities. There is an academic emphasis, but it also includes leadership and learning the social skills needed to work together. The program gives students access to equipment, such as robotics and 3D printers, which can be difficult for individual families to afford.
The Tuesday Connections program is for intermediate and advanced kids, which is generally third through eighth-grade students. On those days, all of the projects are differentiated, and they keep the groups small to account for the wide-ranging abilities of the students. Thursdays are for the beginners, which is typically K‑2 but also includes third and fourth graders who are still working on their literacy skills. “On our younger day, we offer an hour of reading intervention within our STEM-based program,” says Honey. “The two teachers are trained in the Orton-Gillingham method, and they are doing intervention with our K‑2 kids. We’re working on Handwriting Without Tears and just getting all those science of reading skills started with our students.”
Next year, Honey is planning to add a new drop-off program on Wednesdays. “We’re adding a specials day. There’s not going to be as much of an academic focus in terms of, you know, writing and academically structured projects,” she says. “My vision that I’m trying to create is all the specials that brick-and-mortar kids get that homeschool students possibly can miss out on.” She expects to have Spanish, yoga, leadership, and some home economics offerings, such as hand sewing and planting seeds.
In addition to the homeschool options, Hope has after-school lessons for kids who need extra support. For English/language arts, this includes foundational reading skills, comprehension, spelling, and writing. For math, they offer help ranging from foundational skills up to high school math support. While homeschoolers can participate in the after-school options, it’s typically students from district, charter, and private schools.
Like most education entrepreneurs, Honey struggles to balance decent pay for her teachers with affordability for her families. She puts a lot of effort into making sure there’s a pleasant and cooperative environment at Hope to keep the staff and students happy. “I have such an incredible team. This business isn’t successful because of me; it’s really successful because I have such a great team,” she emphasizes. “A lot of the special ed teachers left for similar reasons, you know, big caseloads, lots of aggressive behavior. So we’re just very happy to work where we get to help kids and do what’s best and follow research-based instruction.”
While it hasn’t been easy, Honey is happy she took the risk and created Hope Education Consulting. “I think what I’m most proud of is that every day I go to work, I truly love being there. Like truly and honestly, no BS, love going to work. And most of my teachers, I think, would say the same thing,” she says. “It’s just a happy place. It’s far less stressful. And that’s what I think is really telling—that I can start a successful business from scratch, and it’s still like one-fifth of my job as a special ed teacher.”