Sarnia homeschooling mother opens an independent school this fall

Emily Coupland spent 10 years homeschooling her five children in the Charlotte Mason tradition. This fall she is opening Hearthstone Community School, a small independent school she hopes will feel like a hearth — a place to gather, belong and grow.

Emily Coupland talks about childhood the way some people talk about land.

Not as something to get through. As something you only get once.

“We want children to leave Hearthstone knowing how to learn for themselves,” she says. “We want them to be capable and well educated, but also to have the confidence to ask questions, follow an idea and pay attention to the world around them, all while maintaining their one and only childhood.”

That last phrase is the one that stays.

Coupland is a Sarnia-born teacher and homeschooling mother who is opening Hearthstone Community School this fall, a small independent school she has been building, in practice, for a decade at her own kitchen table. Enrollment is open for the 2026-27 school year. A classroom address is not yet locked in. She has been looking at space at a local church. That is not confirmed. If a physical classroom is not ready, she says the school will start outdoors and take advantage of the geography Sarnia already has.

The idea, she says, is older than the building hunt.

Coupland was born in Sarnia, spent her early childhood on a quiet country road and her teen years in Petrolia, then moved to Toronto. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in religious studies and Canadian youth studies and a Bachelor of Education with a focus in special education at Tyndale University in 2012. She supply taught in the first years of her career. After she and her husband, Steve, began their family, she started home educating their children.

For 10 years she has homeschooled their five children in the Charlotte Mason tradition, studying the philosophy while she practiced it. The last five of those years were on a hobby farm in Lambton County. The family is back in Sarnia now.

Mason was a nineteenth-century British educator whose first principle was blunt: children are born persons. Not empty vessels. Not projects. Persons, already, with minds that need rich ideas rather than a conveyor belt of worksheets. Her method leans on living books instead of dry textbooks, short focused lessons, narration (a child telling back what they have heard or read), nature study, handicrafts, art, music, poetry and time outdoors.

“Never be within doors when you can rightly be without,” Mason wrote. Coupland has been living that line for years.

Hearthstone is her attempt to offer that same approach to families who want it in a school, not only in a homeschool. The school day, as she describes it, is meant to look different from a conventional classroom: literature, history, science, mathematics, poetry, art and music; first-hand work with the hands; conversation about what has been read; habits of attention and perseverance. High expectations, she says, without turning the day into a race from one assignment to the next.

“The aim isn’t to make learning easier,” the school’s launch note puts it. “It is to make it richer.”

The name is the other half of the argument. A hearthstone is the stone in front of a fireplace, the place people gather, eat, tell stories and warm themselves. Coupland wants a school small enough that teachers know more than a child’s marks. Mixed ages. Parents welcomed in rather than kept at the office door. Families who might eventually share a table, lend a hand and help build the place they are sending their children to.

“We’d love for Hearthstone to become the kind of place where you don’t just drop your child off and pick them up,” she says. “We want families to feel known here. We want people to bring what they have to offer, and we want children to see adults learning, creating, working and serving alongside them.”

She talks about Sarnia-Lambton as part of the curriculum, not the backdrop. Artists, tradespeople, farmers, historians, scientists, the St. Clair River, local industry and local history. Children, she says, should learn to pay attention to the place they actually live in, then look outward from it, “rooted without being insular, and curious without being untethered.”

That is the vision. The practical questions are still being answered in public.

Hearthstone is an independent school. In Ontario that means it operates outside the publicly funded boards and receives no provincial operating money. Operators must file an annual notice of intention with the Ministry of Education. The ministry does not fund private schools and does not run their day-to-day programs. Independent schools have been multiplying in the province; a 2026 Cardus study found more than 300 new ones had opened in Ontario since 2022.

Coupland has not published tuition, grade range or a staff list in the material she sent the Journal. She describes the school as being in early stages and is inviting families to ask questions rather than treating the launch as finished business.

What she is sure about is the reason she is doing the work.

After urban and rural ministry, a decade of home education and five years on a farm, she says the through-line is proximity: knowing children well enough to teach them as persons, and leaving them enough unhurried time that childhood is not treated as a problem to be optimized away.

“At the heart of Hearthstone is a simple hope,” she says. “That children would know how to learn, know how to live, and know that they belong somewhere. And that families would find not just a school, but a community in which to grow together.”

Families looking for more can reach Coupland at [email protected] or 519-464-3616.