TrailblazED retreat in Eagar to support microschools and school choice

A microschool leadership retreat will bring education entrepreneurs to downtown Eagar as Denise Lever’s TrailblazED network pushes a model that has already spread across her Baker Creek Academy operation. The TrailblazED Retreat is listed for Friday, July 31, 2026, at 12 p.m. MST at 33 N Main St. in Eagar, with programming running through Aug. 2.

TrailblazED is tied to Baker Creek Academy and to Lever’s effort to train founders who want to build small, flexible learning spaces outside traditional district structures. Lever, who founded Baker Creek Academy and the TrailblazED Microschool Leadership Forge, has described the network as a place to share resources, ideas and experience in microschooling. Baker Creek Academy LLC was filed with the Arizona Corporation Commission on May 23, 2023, with Lever listed as the registered agent and sole member.

The retreat lands in a county where school structure matters because the choices are limited and the geography is wide. Apache County has 14 districts, 44 schools and 13,357 students, a spread that makes long bus rides and narrow program menus part of daily life for many families from Eagar to the New Mexico state line. TrailblazED’s own site says Baker Creek Academy’s microschool network was on track to account for nearly 9% of Eagar’s total K-8 student population in the 2024-25 school year, a striking share in a small town.

Arizona’s school-choice expansion adds more momentum. The Arizona Department of Education says the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program is open for the 2026-2027 school year, with 100,713 students enrolled this school year and 6,405 new students enrolled for next school year as of June 15, 2026. The department says ESA dollars can be used for private school tuition, curricula, educational supplies, tutoring and other education expenses, and eligibility includes kindergarten students and many other categories of Arizona residents. Prenda, another microschool provider, says most microschools run four to five hours per day, four days per week, and that Arizona families can use ESA funding with little or no upfront cost to start a microschool.

The model is still drawing scrutiny over how it fits into public oversight. A 2025 report on Baker Creek Academy’s regulatory issues said state fire officials once tried to classify Lever’s tutoring center as a school, underscoring the tension between microschool growth and state regulation. A March 2026 profile from the Cato Institute said Lever’s network had grown to eight K-8 microschools, four in her building and four in homes, plus a virtual microschool and two high-school cohorts. For families in Apache County, the Eagar retreat will showcase a fast-growing alternative, but also a question that follows every school-choice debate: whether the next expansion will broaden options or pull more students away from already small rural school communities.