Life Goals

There’s what your kids learn in homeschool. Then there’s the real world . . . Plant Street Academy provides homeschool enrichment programs that bridge that gap.

Lenka Brady, managing partner of Plant Street Academy, says she was driven to open the school because academics are one thing—whether in school or homeschooled. Real life is another. “Kids today have forgotten, or never learned, how to talk, make friends, navigate conflict, or think creatively. That’s all the extra stuff they don’t teach in school. At Plant Street Academy, we help kids get off their computers and come back to life. We teach them resiliency and self-confidence. How to think for themselves. And how to articulate what they’re thinking.”

The lead educator at the Academy is Dorothea Holcomb. A highly regarded figure in the homeschool community, she is the creator of the Plant Street Academy curriculum. Their main focus right now is to teach the kids what to actually do with the classic academics. How to take what they’ve learned their entire life in a traditional school environment and apply it in the real world. 

There are two programs at the Academy. HighSchool on Mondays and Middle School on Wednesdays. And, Lenka says, “Our program is approved for Florida’s Step Up, so parents can apply for scholarships for their children.”

Both programs combine structure, socialization, and real-world learning so children develop independence, critical thinking, and the confidence to thrive. Through hands-on projects, entrepreneurship, life skills, and guided mentorship, students don’t just learn, they apply, lead, communicate, and problem-solve in ways that prepare them for today’s fast-changing world.

“I’ve seen college graduates go home with their degree in hand and have no idea what comes next,” Lenka says. “They don’t know how to interview for a job, much less write a resumé. Many have no idea where they want to go in life, what they want to become.” Plant Street Academy helps young people develop the skills and habits necessary to answer those very important real-world questions.

The high school curriculum  at Plant Street includes business fundamentals  where teens  learn to come up with an idea for a product and then build a business around it. They understand how to sell, reverse-engineer the money to learn what factors affect final costs, and how to judge profits.

Financial responsibility is a real-world area often overlooked in public education. The Plant Street Academy teaches students about taxes, how the government uses them to pay for  services, what credit is, and how credit card interest works.

Debate is an often-ignored skill that the Plant Street Academy  embraces for all sorts of subjects, even the controversial ones. “We encourage healthy debate in a safe place,” Lenka says. “It’s important that students learn to accept controversial views and people that may be different from them.”

Critical thinking is a huge part of everything the Academy does. “We ask students to give us the pluses and negatives. Then we ask what makes the most sense to them. We let them come up with their own answers and accept whether they’re right or admit when they are wrong.”

Raising confident, adaptable kids is not an easy task. The goal for Plant Street Academy is to become the resource, a community center even, that parents and children can rely on for help in preparing them for their futures.