Bob Hagin, Ed.D.
Founder, Head of Schools
Bob founded what began as Northwest Liberty School in 2008, later renamed Market Square Education to better reflect its vision: a marketplace of options, not a single fixed path. The premise hasn’t changed since day one: “I didn’t build a private school to compete with public education, and I didn’t build it as an escape from it — I built it so a student’s options wouldn’t be limited by which system they happened to be standing in.” That’s meant nearly two decades of doing both at once — serving public school students who need a course their home school can’t offer, and families who need a different structure entirely, often through direct partnership with district ALE and Open Doors programs rather than around them.
He brings 27 years in public education to that work, most of it in the Northshore School District as a classroom teacher and technology resource teacher, including eight years expanding and directing Northshore’s Secondary Summer Academy — hundreds of students each summer, referred by the counselors who saw what they needed before anyone else did. Before Northshore, he ran Hazelmere, a one-room K–6 school/district with 10 students, where he was teacher, superintendent, and groundskeeper — and successfully petitioned the State Board of Education to keep the district open when it faced closure.
He also founded ModuLearning and authored Emerging Capacity, building on his doctoral research into how purpose, risk, and advocacy shape what a person becomes capable of over time. That thinking runs underneath everything at MSE: school matters, and a student’s growth is bigger than a transcript.