Let's start with a basic question:

For me, the answer is much bigger than a diploma.

My grandfather was the son of Jewish immigrants who fled persecution in Belarus. By the time he was ten, his parents and brother had passed away. He grew up in various orphanages in Cleveland, often alone and adrift, and carrying more loss than any child should have to carry.

Then, in high school, two teachers saw something in him.

A math teacher and a chemistry teacher took him seriously. They invested in him. They changed the direction of his life. He went on to earn a PhD in applied mathematics, helped found the math department at Wright State University, and spent his career as a professor, pouring into his students for decades.

I think about that story often because those teachers did more than help one student succeed. Their belief changed the trajectory of a family. Their belief had generational impact.

That is the standard I carry with me into Horizon.

I have spent most of my adult life in and around schools — as a teacher, school and nonprofit board member, education nonprofit leader, parent, and advisor. I was a founding science teacher at Valor Collegiate here in Nashville. I later led Teach For America in Nashville and Chattanooga. I have visited schools, worked with teachers and principals and school system leaders, studied new learning models, helped build organizations, and spent years thinking about what young people will need in a world changing faster than the schools around them.

I have also experienced school from the other side.

As a student, I remember walking out of an AP French exam completely livid because I realized I had spent years being moved along without actually being prepared. I also remember a physics class where we built a catapult with my dad and classmates — doing the math, testing it, adjusting it, and trying again. One experience looked like school but left me unprepared. The other was rigorous, collaborative, practical, and memorable decades later.

As a teacher, I saw what happened when students experienced real challenge paired with real belief. I saw young people who had learned to shut down begin to take risks because an adult refused to give up on them. I saw that children are limitless.

And now, as a parent, the questions feel far from theoretical. I want my own sons to be known for who they are — not simply managed for how well they comply. I want them to encounter adults who see their strengths, push them toward excellence, and help them discover what they can contribute. I want them to experience the delight of learning and the satisfaction of mastery.

That is why I am building Horizon.

The problem is not one thing

Nashville is an extraordinary city. It is also a city where too many children are not getting what they deserve from school.

Even after meaningful recent progress, roughly two-thirds of MNPS students did not meet expectations in English or math on the 2025 state assessments.¹ In Tennessee, one in four high school students reported seriously considering suicide in 2023.² And our own state has had years when only about 40% of graduates met its definition of being truly “ready” for what came next.³ Marian Wright Edelman famously challenged the nation with the ancestral African question, “How are the children?” We regretfully must answer, “they are not yet well.”

The numbers above describe different problems, but I believe they are connected.

Too many students move through school without mastering the fundamentals.

Too many feel anonymous, disconnected, or unsure whether the adults around them really know them.

Too many experience school as something to get through rather than something that helps them understand who they are and what they might become.

And too many arrive at graduation with a diploma but without enough clarity, experience, or momentum toward a life that can provide purpose and financial stability.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is changing the world they are preparing to enter.

That creates both an opportunity and a responsibility.

Horizon will be built for the age of AI — and around the student

The deepest idea behind Horizon is not technology.

It is that school should be organized around the student.

A student is not a seventh-grade schedule. A student is not a test score. A student is not a transcript.

A student is a person with a particular set of strengths, interests, relationships, experiences, and possibilities.

So Horizon begins with different questions:

We are designing the school around helping every student answer those questions more fully over time.

That means strong academics. Students should leave Horizon as powerful readers, writers, mathematicians, thinkers, and communicators. Technology will help us give students more precise practice and feedback, so a child who needs support gets it sooner and a child who is ready for more can keep moving.

It means great teachers remain central. I am excited about what AI can do for learning, but I have never seen a piece of software believe in a child the way a great teacher can. We will use technology to give teachers better information and more time for the work that matters most: teaching, discussing, coaching, mentoring, noticing, challenging, and connecting.

It means preparing students for the world they will actually enter. Students will build fluency with AI, data, personal finance, entrepreneurship, communication, and other modern capabilities alongside a rigorous academic foundation.

And it means school should lead somewhere.

Career exploration will begin early. As students grow older, they will increasingly learn beyond the walls of the school — through college courses, internships, apprenticeships, real projects, credentials, and work alongside adults in the community.

By graduation, we want every student to have more than a diploma. We want them to have evidence of what they can do, meaningful experiences behind them, real options in front of them, and a next step already underway.

Powerful technology requires strong judgment

Being built for the age of AI also means taking its risks seriously.

Children should learn how to use powerful technology without surrendering their own thinking to it.

At Horizon, AI will be used intentionally and safely. Students will learn when it can help them practice, create, explore, analyze, and get feedback — and when the work needs to come from their own memory, reasoning, judgment, or conversation with another human being.

They will learn to question outputs rather than blindly trust them. They will learn that a machine that sounds human is still a machine. They will learn to protect their privacy, recognize bias and error, resist shortcuts that undermine learning, and understand that convenience is not the same thing as growth.

We want AI to strengthen human capability, not weaken it. In this machine era, we want students to understand what it means to be fully and beautifully human.

And we want technology to create more room for human connection, not less.

Known. Prepared. Launched.

If I had to reduce Horizon to three promises, they would be these.

That is what Horizon's vision, “Every student launched,” means to me.

I am building Horizon because I believe we know enough now to build something better.

We know that relationships matter. We know that rigorous knowledge matters. We know that students learn differently and need different kinds of challenge and support. We know that young people rise when they are trusted with meaningful work. We know that the transition from school to adult life is too important to leave to chance.

And now we have tools that make a more personal model of school possible at a scale that was much harder before.

The work ahead is to put those pieces together thoughtfully. Few schools will do that. Horizon will forge the path.

My grandfather's teachers could not have known where their belief in one orphaned boy would ultimately lead. They simply saw a student in front of them and decided he was worth investing in.

Horizon begins from the same conviction.