Our Team

Brooklyn Wetzel

I am an conventional school drop out with a passion for freedom and autonomy. From a young age, I sought my own path in social justice music promotion, visual art, and small business. As a youth I was motivated to create out of the box experiences, founding the first high school chapter of Amnesty international in Montana and helping to bring the National AIDS quilt exhibit to the community. I was also heavily influenced by being a member of a creative teen theater troupe where I was encouraged to explore my own individuality while practicing team building. I utilized those skills as an adult while bootstrapping an event photography business and working on the ground floor at a Indigenous language game start-up. In addition to those pursuits, you can find me using ceramic, mixed media and assemblage to make visual art, writing creatively in my free time.    

With my unconventional learning background it made sense that my children and family did not fit into the mainstream system. We were able to enroll in Glacier Lake School, a Sudbury model school on the Salish and Kootenai Reservation in Western Montana. I was brought into Glacier lake a few days a week as a facilitator. It was there that I found a real sense of purpose and a calling to continue to work in self directed education. Building genuine relationships and offering unconditional encouragement to youth became one of my life goals. 

In 2018, we moved to Oregon. Looking to expand my experience in alternative education, I traveled to California and completed the Agile Learning Facilitator training. The ALF training further solidified my commitment to creating alternative educational experiences for kids that respected their autonomy, interests and natural abilities. From 2020-23 I worked at the Hub: Micro academy as a co-facilitator of their online program. 

A digital native and infomaniac, one of my favorite things is to connect people with new resources to explore their passions and to support communities.  I have a deep trust in people of all ages to grow and learn to be their best selves without coercion or judgment.


Bria Bloom

I call myself a born and raised unschooler. From early childhood, I negotiated how I would approach my education. As a homeschooled child, I played a lot with my friends in our neighborhood, read books (mostly fiction and books about Cheetahs), kept dozens of journals, took frequent trips to the library, played Dungeons and Dragons, spent many hours on the computer, and chose which classes to take at our homeschool resource center and elsewhere.

At 16, I enrolled in college through the local Running Start program. Continuing my unconventional approach to learning, I entered the Fairhaven program at Western Washington University, where I was allowed to create my own major: Envisioning the Creative Classroom. In college, I spent a lot of time writing and looking into education alternatives. I then worked five years in early childhood education teaching at a play-based center that was trusting of children and believed in individual freedom. Finally, in 2017, I came home. 

Home was returning to my roots as an unschooler. I started to work with The Alliance for Self-Directed Education, where I have worked for the past 9 years. I melded what was an innate part of me to my new understanding of the world of Self-Directed Education, unschooling, and youth liberation. I became a parent. 

Now I am a mom of two, a 3 ⅓-year old and a 15-year old. I have worked and played as an SDE facilitator both at a school and through founding and offering PDX Flying Squads back in 2018. I am also the co-founder of Flying Squads, and love to support parents in shifting their relationships with their kids as a partnership partnering coach. 

I love to write (you can catch me writing about my life as a mother here!), feel at home in any form of solo expressive or partner-based dance, practiced martial arts for over a dozen years (it will always be a part of me), love to explore plant-based cooking and share food with friends, am a fiction-reading fiend, am dabbling in singing, and spend a lot of my time reading and discussing education and parenting ideas with anyone who is interested. I love to engage, work, and play as a facilitator and trust youth deeply.

Future Facilitator

We will be accepting applications for a third facilitator, hired through a special online assembly of enrolled youth before the start of Fall 2026. Reach out if our mission resonates with you and you would like more information .