A Washer and Dryer on the Front Porch
In the fall of 2022, a washer and dryer sat on my front porch, and a school stood in my entryway.
We could barely walk through my house. Every delivery for a campus that did not exist yet came to our homes: shelves, materials, tiny chairs stacked to the ceiling, boxes of Montessori materials waiting to be inventoried.
I had just left a software consulting job. My co-founder Shavonda Lawson and I had put in $8,000 each, begged and borrowed the rest, and signed a lease on a building that construction delays kept pushing further from ready.
The building was supposed to be ready in June. We hired our dream team based on that date. Then construction slipped, and slipped again, and again, more months on end. We paid 13 teachers from July to November. No classrooms. No children. Payroll anyway. They had signed on with us, and we were not going to let that team go.
We opened The Nest at Anderson Mill that November. Within six months, we had 137 children enrolled. The next year, a Texas Workforce Commission startup grant we almost did not apply for changed everything about what we could build.
People assume the story starts with the school. It starts earlier. Ten years in the Army as a logistics sergeant. Trauma shelters, addiction counseling, and hospice work while finishing my MSW. A year inside a national Montessori operator. Then software. Every chapter taught the same lesson from a different angle: people do their best in environments that are built well. The environment is not the backdrop. It is the intervention.
Today, The Nest is a nationally accredited network serving children from infancy through adolescence, with another campus in development on 50 acres of ranch land. Shavonda builds the village: classrooms, culture, community. I build everything underneath it: finance, operations, compliance, and the 200+ SOPs that let our guides give children their full attention.
None of it has been easy. Most of it has not gone according to plan, but all of it has been worth building.
I am going to start writing here about the parts of school-building nobody puts in the brochure: the real numbers, the systems, the hard weeks, and what it costs to build education that lasts.
If that interests you, stick around.