There’s a moment I come back to often when I think about what it means to start a school. Actually, it’s two moments that have stayed with me from the beginning.
The summer before we opened The Innovation School, our team traveled to Boston for the Constructing Modern Knowledge conference. We were brand-new and full of ideas, energy, and uncertainty. While we were there, we had the chance to meet Gary Stager, and we shared that we were building a small, project-based school designed to offer something different, something that didn’t really exist in North Dakota. His response stayed with me. He encouraged us to stay true to our vision and not to let others pull us away from what we believed this school could become.
Not long after that experience, we attended a local education conference where we found ourselves having a similar conversation with a local education leader. Once again, I explained what we were building and why we believed in it so deeply. This time, though, the response was very different. He paused, gave a slight scoff, and simply said, “Good luck with that.”
Those two moments happened within months of each other, yet they left completely different impressions. To this day, I can still hear both voices clearly in my mind. One reminds me to trust the vision and stay the course, while the other exists as a quiet seed of doubt.
If you are starting something, especially something that challenges the way things have always been done, you will inevitably encounter both kinds of responses. There will be people who immediately understand what you’re trying to do and encourage you to keep going, and there will be others who question it, dismiss it, or simply don’t see the need for it at all.
Recently, when I was on Kerry McDonald’s LiberatED podcast, she asked me what advice I would give to someone just starting out. My answer came quickly, because it’s something I’ve had to remind myself of again and again: trust your vision, trust your gut, and go for it.
That advice doesn’t come from a place of everything going smoothly or everyone being on board. In reality, starting a school involves countless moving pieces: logistics, budgets, enrollment, staffing, and curriculum decisions. There are moments when it would be far easier to adjust your vision to make it more comfortable or more familiar to others. Trusting your vision doesn’t mean that the process is easy or even clear.
In fact, starting a school is far less about a single big leap and much more about a thousand small, uncertain decisions stacked on top of one another. It’s late nights spent working through budgets that don’t quite balance yet; wondering how many students will actually enroll; and hoping you can build something sustainable. It’s hiring staff before you fully know what enrollment will look like; designing systems that don’t yet exist; constantly adjusting in real time.
You carry the responsibility of families who trust you with their children, and you think about the students who need something different and may not thrive in a traditional model. You feel the urgency to get it right for them. You’re building something that people don’t fully understand yet, which means that you’re not only creating the school, but also explaining and justifying it over and over again. And that’s where those voices come back in.
When things feel uncertain (and they will), it’s easy to start questioning whether the voices were right. It becomes tempting to shift your model, to make it look more like what people expect, or to scale back parts of your vision simply to make others more comfortable. We felt that tension early on. There were moments where it would have been simpler to follow a more traditional path, to adopt systems that already existed, or to adjust our approach to align more closely with what people were accustomed to seeing in our local educational landscape.
Those choices might have made things easier to explain and, in some ways, easier to implement. But they also would have taken us further away from why we started in the first place. The part I don’t think gets talked about enough is that starting something new isn’t just about building it once; it’s about choosing it again and again, especially when it would be easier not to.
When I think back to those two early conversations, I realize now that they weren’t just moments of encouragement and doubt. They were, in many ways, a preview of what this journey would require: the ability to hear both and still to move forward with clarity. The reality is, not everyone will see your vision right away, and some people never will. But the families who need it will, and the students who thrive in it will.
Starting a school isn’t just about creating a place for students to learn. It’s about creating something that didn’t exist before and having the persistence to carry it through the uncertainty until it becomes real. I still hear both voices. But through time and experience, I now trust the one that told us to stay true to who we set out to be.
