Quests, Not Grades: Inside the School With No Report Cards

 

Tanner: I think a lot of people will agree that we need public ed reform. Even in public Ed, I know I think plenty of teachers at Ed, my old school would agree with that statement.

Nicole: Hi, it’s producer Nicole Denson. Today we’re talking with Tanner Bowman, founder of Optio, a quest based 12 learning platform built on a simple but countercultural idea. The process is the goal. Tanner spent ten years teaching across every kind of school setting, and what he saw convinced him that the kids who thrived were learning despite the system, not because of it. So he left and built something different up to helps families recognize and track the passion driven learning that their kids are already doing every day, and count all of it as official learning. He holds a doctorate in educational technology, has run five marathons, and is an avid pipe organist who has played historic instruments across Europe. Back to the show.

Coby: You want to get a drink?

Tanner: Let’s do it. All right, let’s go.

Coby: So talk to me about what’s going on.

Tanner: Yeah. What? Optio. Lately, things have been just really going well for us. It’s been so much fun for me. I. My background is in education. I was a teacher for ten years. Where? American fork high school.

Coby: Okay.

Tanner: Yeah, I spent ten years there as a computer science teacher.

Coby: Sweet.

Tanner: Absolutely loved it. I loved af. Great people. Just issues. I think my main issues are just with that system as a whole. It’s just not great for just sparking a love of the process of learning. And kids. It’s too.

Coby: You’re talking about the prep school system or just the public school system?

Tanner: School? Yeah. Public school. It’s just focused on completion and checking boxes rather than actual love of learning.

Coby: Inspiring the love of learning. Right. So what is optio that? How do you solve that? Like, I assume that’s what I believe is right.

Tanner: Exactly. Yeah. Optio was my solution to that. So, when I was at American Fork, I got a I did a doctorate degree in educational technology, and I did my dissertation research on the relationship of autonomy and intrinsic motivation. And that. Love it. Oh, yeah.

Coby: This is bad.

Tanner: Ass.

Coby: Right? Let’s go. We might need two coffees.

Tanner: Okay. Let’s just. Let’s double it. Yeah. So the whole idea, and this is what I experimented with, in my classroom for years, was can I give kids more autonomy? And then if I do give them that additional autonomy, do I see an increase in their intrinsic motivation to want to learn? So I did my dissertation, my dissertation research focused on that.

Tanner: And the answer is yes, as I think most of us kind of intuitively understand that. Yeah. But I wanted some data to back it up. So that’s what I focus my research on that. And so when I was at APH, I every year I taught there, my goal was to remove a rule that I had the previous year.

Tanner: Love that I was. So I would take away rules, and eventually, you know, 5 or 6 years in, I ran out of rules to take away. I kept my joke with my students was, I only have one rule, which is don’t be annoying. If it’s,

Coby: Actually a big ask for.

Tanner: it, which is a huge ask for teenagers, especially the traditional type of boy you’ll get in a computer science class. Tough. Fast. Yeah. And so then I said, okay, I’m out of rules to delete. So, what let’s give them a little bit of a proactive form of autonomy. And so what I eventually got to was I was able to make attendance optional for all my classes, sort of in line with that autonomy feeling of, you don’t have to be here.

Coby: Yeah.

Tanner: And so I had a form that their parents would sign that the parents are saying, yeah, I’m fine if my kid, misses, you know, skips this class, and I wouldn’t penalize them for being absent just as long as they, you know, stayed caught up and did the work. Still, I didn’t care if they were in class.

Tanner: And what was so fun about that was generally on the first day, kids are there and they’re just buckled up. They’re used to the teachers just lay in 1015 classroom rules and expectations on them. And they’ve just got a first day. They’ve got to just internalize all these rules that they’re going to have to follow.

Coby: Yeah.

Tanner: And when they got to my class, I told them, attendance is optional as long as you stay caught up and you can sleep it if you have me first period, sleep in and come in for a second period. If you’ve got me before lunch, leave early and have an extended lunch. If you’ve got me for fourth period, go home at lunchtime.

Tanner: And enjoy the rest of your day. And the kids, they just like. They perked up their eyes. Got why they were so excited. They couldn’t believe that a teacher was, like, telling them they didn’t have to come to class. It was shocking to them. And what I love seeing was for a couple weeks, you know, kids would get the permission slip sign and then maybe for about two weeks, I wouldn’t see them.

Tanner: And then two weeks into class, they started attending, because they realized I don’t have to be here.

Coby: I want to be here.

Tanner: I want to be here. Yeah. And so what? The result was I had a classroom full of kids who were there because they chose to be. They were not being forced by anyone to be in my class. They were just there because they wanted to be, and that was so much fun for me to be able to work with kids in that mindset, and that the end result is the same.

Tanner: They’re attending basically every class, but they don’t have to. And so it’s a whole change in the dynamic of the classroom environment, which was so much fun for me to figure out.

Coby: There’s so many analogies. So I just got to say that is my approach, to that mindset informs my perspective and approach to all things, all thing.

Tanner: Oh, saying that that’s my life framework. That is my tattoo. Thou mayest.

Coby: Thou mayest.

Tanner: Thou mayest Trump. Shall Tim show? Yes. East of Eden for other.

Coby: Yea thou man is my favorite by my sister’s favorite book before she died. Tim. Shel. She had. Tim.

Tanner: Yeah, that’s what this is. So that’s what this. Yeah.

Coby: It is like when you let them do what they want to do, you give them the opportunity to see what they’d rather.

Tanner: You nailed it. Exactly.

Coby: Yeah I love that.

Tanner: And that’s up to you. Optio is the sort of the Latin root of option up choice, optio choice. And so that’s the whole philosophy that our school is built on is we’re giving kids meaningful autonomy.

Coby: Yeah. Without a well, if you choose this, you’re free to choose this, but there’s going to be negative consequences. Right? So you’re free to just have these consequences that really are still arbitrary based on because this is the framework that I believe. Yeah, exactly. That’s so I mean, it speaks so clearly. You saw something that I don’t want to denigrate your peers, or at least some of them must see, or have seen the same thing you do.

Coby: Why? What makes you different for. I mean, doing something about it. Are some of your. Did you have peers that we’re doing some of the same kinds of things in the classroom? At least I.

Tanner: Didn’t. I was the weird one. And that was always my problem. I was the weird one. And it was the number one thing I heard from my fellow teachers was that only works because you teach computer science. Like they would say that it’s just my specific subject was the reason that worked because it’s an elective, you know, and, you know, the English teacher who kids don’t really generally want to take an English class, but they do want to take a computer science class.

Tanner: Yeah. I don’t completely buy that.

Coby: And especially my teacher and Paine who anybody that’s my age that lived in where Joe would know she was a famous AP was teacher. I had her first period. Sorry to interrupt. She had the same perspective. Oh, yeah. And I only graduated because she was my first period. I was late and or missed every but what I missed, I was always late, at least out.

Coby: But I loved the class. I was super engaged, did all the reading and all the debates when I was there. But the reason why, and she figured out early on is the structure. The necessary structure was killing. Yeah. So anyway like you got no it.

Tanner: Yeah. You nailed it. And so I guess part of it was I got so sick of them telling me it’s only because it only works for computer science. I said, okay, I’ll start my own school and I’ll prove you wrong. So now we doing this exact model and optio on every single subject. We built a learning platform that our students use that allows them to, completely structure their and personalize their entire high school education in ways that are aligned with their passion project.

Tanner: So, for.

Coby: Example.

Tanner: The way we work with the way we do it is through quests. That’s our system. So students, will we have a library of quests on our platform and students will sort of scroll through those. And it’s stuff like hike the way, run A5K, read this book. It just we have hundreds of them on there.

Tanner: And the students can also create their.

Coby: So awesome. So they learn as a function of or a byproduct of the quest. So exactly. The emphasis is on the quest. It’s not on the mechanics of the quest.

Tanner: Right? So I’ll give an example. I have a student right now who is doing the quest to read the Mistborn trilogy. He’s a huge Brandon Sanderson fan. Great trilogy. Yeah. So he’s reading this board. He’s learning math credit. If anyone if you’re familiar with the books, the whole magic system is very physics based.

Tanner: It’s very mathematical. And so he’s earning official math credit for analyzing the physics of elements. See, like when you push on something, the equal pressure comes back on you, like that whole thing. So he’s taking a mathematical approach to the book. Other students. So it’s like a dissertation a dozen. Yeah.

Coby: So he’s writing a dissertation.

Tanner: He’s we got high schoolers writing dissertations.

Coby: Oh, I love this, I love it. So how long is after you’ve been in, business for.

Tanner: This will be our second school year. Last year was our first. Our first year, we ran an in-person lab school. We had a handful of students coming to our in-person program, and that’s where we sort of perfected this quest based model with the platform. And now, we have moved away from running an actual school ourselves, and we are offering our technology to existing schools, particularly micro schools.

Tanner: We have quite a few micro schools that use our platform as their full, tech stack for their school.

Coby: Okay.

Tanner: And then also homeschool families use it. I was.

Coby: Gonna say like.

Tanner: Tailor made. Exactly. So homeschool now, homeschool parents can offer high school diplomas from their home school.

Coby: While.

Tanner: Using whatever curriculum their families already. So jealous.

Coby: So jealous. You know, Tyler and I, your business partner, last year, talked about something like this. And now it was actually two years ago, I think. No, it was last year, beginning last year, actually, I met up, but it was about it was around vocational schools. Right. So, like, and he’s like, I remember him referencing that he’s talking to somebody or I don’t remember.

Tanner: Yeah. Well, that’s about the time we started talking on up there together.

Coby: Okay. Yeah, that is so cool. So your peers were not on board? This isn’t necessarily related to optio, but, and I’m going to ask this for personal reasons, but,

Coby: It let me how do you. When all of your peers are saying you’re crazy, how do you disregard that and move forward with something that’s unproven? I mean, you had the data from your work. Sure, but it could have been just for computer science. Like, it’s not like they are neophyte in education. They’re professional educators. Just as motivated to be impactful as you are.

Coby: How do you keep your Northstar? How do you believe in yourself when everybody in your space is telling you, no, that’s not the right way to do it.

Tanner: The kids, I saw how much it benefited the kids. And, when I see that, I see them go into their English class, their math class in the morning and just, I use the term getting crushed. They’re getting crushed by the system. And then they would show up to my class and experience this sense of freedom on how they want to learn and, you know, just they get that hit of autonomy and they start to experience what it’s like for an adult to actually trust them to make meaningful decisions about the way that they learn.

Tanner: And just seeing how empowering that was for kids. They I just had so many students who and they hated every single other class that they were in, and they would tell me that this is the one class where they could just learn without worrying about failing. That’s a whole nother thing too, is like, I just refuse to, penalize failure.

Tanner: And the public system is set up to penalize failure, and I try to reward failure. So it’s just seeing how beneficial it was for these students.

Coby: Why is the public system set up to punish failure?

Tanner: Grades. It’s the grades that we’re locked into these letter grades, okay? And it forces us to do that. And you can go to a teacher meeting, and they’ll all talk about growth mindset, and they’ll all talk about how we want to. We don’t we want to incentivize failure. We don’t want to punish failure. But then our letter grade system is the complete opposite.

Tanner: Absolutely. In practice it’s a.

Coby: Rating and a judgment hierarchy.

Tanner: Exactly.

Coby: You know, it’s I dived into this a little bit, and I do periodically because this intersects with, you know, my profession as well. And, I recognized early on and, I think I even took a class in college about this where, you know, the education of the public educational system in America is not really about anything other than teaching how to, for lack of a better term.

Coby: And I don’t want to come across as negative, but to conform right to be part of a larger system. Founded in an industrialized or just recently, most industrialized America. And how do you churn out the very best factory workers? Exactly. Not how do you churn out the most autonomous and critically thinking citizens? And so but you can find fault ideas long but all day long.

Coby: But like, this is exactly what you’re talking about, right? And, I would like to posit that I think autonomy is the thing, but I don’t think that’s where it starts from. I think you nailed it when you said the opportunity to fail. That’s grace. You provide a situation where somebody can learn and fall down and learn, like learn from the following, as opposed to be penalized from the falling, which that is the prerequisite for creativity.

Coby: Yes. Like John Cleese gave this wonderful address in the 80s before Ted talks were thing. You know who John Cleese is?

Tanner: I know the name.

Coby: Yeah. And it’s about the relationship between humor, creativity and the fear or lack of fear of failure. And I think that’s exactly what you’re building, right?

Tanner: Yeah. And we’ve even developed a whole different grading system. What if we use those at work? We use experience points. And so it’s sort of in line with our quest model.

Coby: You just gamified it like you call. Exactly. Yes. Dungeons and Dragons. It’s Dungeon Public.

Tanner: Yeah. Where it’s this red truck right there.

Coby: That’s it. Yeah. Okay.

Tanner: Yeah. And so, yeah, we do educational quests, and then completing assignments earns you experience points. Whether you succeed at your task or you fail at the task is irrelevant. You earn experience points for doing it.

Coby: So how are administrators feeling about this?

Tanner: Like public school administrators?

Coby: Yeah. I mean, this flies in the face of lots of PhDs.

Tanner: Well, one thing is, ten years in public, Ed, I have yet to meet a single person who thinks letter grades are an effective way to assess our kids. I generally, the people I talk to, they know that letter grades are that they suck. But always the response is we have nothing else. What else are we going to do?

Tanner: Because the colleges.

Coby: It’s not just the kids, but letter grades are a terrible, albeit the only way to determine whether a teacher is effective and whether school systems are effective. And then there’s the funding question. I mean, I remember there was a book called Freakonomics that was at that book. Yeah, it was all about like testing in, I think Chicago.

Coby: Anyway. Keep going.

Tanner: Yeah, I know, yeah. You’re right on line. Just the whole idea of we’re stuck with this letter grade system and there’s no alternatives. No one’s come up with a better alternative yet. So we’re just going to keep doing it. And so that’s what I’m trying to advocate is this new experience point system is you do something.

Tanner: And whether you fail or whether you succeeded, you grew and we want and our grading system as experience points rewards experience not perfection.

Coby: And you’re literally the educational version of me. Okay. This is exactly how I think about marketing.

Tanner: I love the meat of it. Just the fact that you knew Tim Schell right off the bat. I’m like, all right, we’re your buddies now.

Coby: Like if you go to market with I want to compete in the market like you go to market with, I want to make this amount of money. I’m here to make money. Well, that’s like I’m here to get it right. But if you go to market with what’s wrong here, and you only get to do that if you have enough experience to actually see the market.

Coby: So this requires experience points. Yeah. And using the experience you points you go okay how can I better elevate or server elevate this market. Regardless of what the market’s what you did with education, you will invariably dominate the market that alternatively you could have only sought to compete in or you’ll create a completely new one and render the one that you were going to compete in absolutely new or move and, but it takes the courage, which I think is usually born from failure, to go.

Coby: No, wait, no, it’s this is the wrong direction altogether. This is actually it’s that it literally is the journey is the destination. And if you.

Tanner: That’s a our optio motto is the process is the goal.

Coby: Yeah.

Tanner: The process is the goal. Not the destination, not the outcome, the journey, the process of consistently engaging in learning. That is the goal.

Coby: That applies to education. It applies to business. Any, I guarantee you any case study that anybody has studied in business school. Because a brand or a company made a name or was able to do something, their approach is what did they do? Let’s replicate what they did because that’s the playbook. And then we can get the same outcome.

Coby: And right there, it’s outcome oriented. Yeah. Why it worked is because they invented their own case. They invented their own way of doing it. That was the magic sauce that everybody’s looking for. That’s the Warren Buffet five second right there. You know. And it applies to business. Let’s grab this I got to do it really I got some questions.

Coby: Yes. Amazing. Tanner Bowman yeah. All right. And, you’re here because. Well, who you here with?

Tanner: I’m here with Optio. Optio is my company.

Coby: Optio is your company we’re going to learn all about. All right. I’m going to learn about it. We’re going to learn about it on the way. To where?

Tanner: To sinners and saints. Coffee.

Coby: Know why sinners and saints is. There’s a name.

Tanner: There. I know. Right. I just like the sort of mom and pop. This isn’t a mom and pop coffee shop, but I like, just sort of those small little coffee shops. I try to avoid going to Starbucks when I can’t. Just the local stuff. Yeah.

Coby: Local. Yeah. So it’s not a mom and pop. There’s more than one location.

Tanner: Yeah, I think they’ve got another one up. Further north. Okay. I think. Yeah.

Coby: When’s the first time you went to Sinners and Saints?

Tanner: I went there with my wife and daughter, a few months ago, and it’s just in, like, kind of little food truck thing, so. Oh, cool to wake up in.

Coby: So it’s a food truck.

Tanner: It’s like a coffee food truck. Yeah.

Coby: Oh. That’s cool. Yeah. What are you going to get today? You know.

Tanner: Just latte.

Coby: A lot of ice latte. Okay. Yeah. Do they have anything that’s, like, specific to sinners and saying.

Tanner: Well, they do. They’ve got. What’s the name? It’s like it’s something with the devil in the name. I forgot I got. I don’t remember the actual name. I was thinking about ordering that, but I couldn’t figure out what it was online, so maybe I’ll try that one. I’ll try. Yeah, let’s try it. I couldn’t figure out what it was.

Coby: So sinners and saints Optio have a lot to talk about on the way.

Tanner: Sounds good.

Nicole: Cool, right?

Tanner: I feel like, I think a lot of people will agree that we need public ed reform, even in public. Ed, I know I think plenty of teachers at Ed, my old school would agree with that statement that we need some kind of reform. We don’t really know how to do it, though. One great place to start is to actually enforce consequences, because what I see in public, Ed and I see this harming kids, is they learn that no matter what they do, you know, the school counselor is going to go and I live this is literally happened a school counselor, like on their knees begging the teacher to pass to the kid so that they could graduate. And I’m like, why does the adult care more about the kid? And that’s what’s wrong. That’s a piece of what’s wrong is the kids realize that they don’t actually experience any consequences in the school system because good.

Coby: Or bad.

Tanner: Good or bad, exactly. Good or bad. Because maybe mom or dad will just call the school and get really mad and convince the teacher to change their grade or the counselor will care more than they do. So they learn that whatever they do is really irrelevant to the outcome because they’re going to graduate. They’re going to get an ace. Someone else is going to make remove the consequences from them. Can. That’s depressing to a kid.

Coby: Why do you think the adults engage in that? You think.

Tanner: That’s. Yeah, this is where I feel a core part of the problem is the ego of the adults in the system. And I don’t necessarily mean ego in the sense of like an inflated ego. I think the issue is that the teachers, base their value as a teacher or their quality of.

Coby: Validation, internal.

Tanner: Validation, like, I am a good teacher if all of my kids get A’s. Yeah. And that’s so wrong because you, a teacher, can’t place their value as a teacher on the outcome of their students. The students are responsible for their outcomes. You are the future.

Coby: Where are you going my whole life? Like, honestly, like, translate that to a business conversation. Like you’re as a business owner, your value is whether or not people buy your stuff you make. So that means that I’m then going to do anything I can to get them to buy. And it becomes this. It creates a toxic glue. And an incorrect feedback loop that rewards exactly the wrong kind of behavior. Just like what you’re talking.

Tanner: Right? Exactly. And so that’s what I always say. I view my role as a teacher is more of a gardener. My responsibility is to cultivate a good environment. Yeah. Where kids can thrive should they choose to thrive.

Coby: Yes.

Tanner: Yeah. And I’m going to support them. But it’s not my fault if they don’t. And not like I’m trying to assign blame or anything, but it’s not something that I take personally. If a kid doesn’t succeed, my focus is on.

Coby: Making.

Tanner: The best environment I can.

Coby: You set the table right? Yeah. There’s a very well quoted, bit of research and it’s in a B to C environment, but I think it applies to B2B too, although maybe not the exact same breakdown. And it’s, in any given market, 5% of those people who are in your total addressable market are in a buying mode. And 95% of the addressable market are not. They’re pre buying about. And the really what your to do is your job is to set the table so that those who fall into the 5%, when they’re ready to buy know who you are. That’s the art. The right way to go, as opposed to any other version of that force people to buy before they’re ready. Only talk to those people when they’re worth your time because they’ve fallen into the 5% like it’s against it’s anti that Gardner mentality. Yeah. But if you use the Gardner mentality and the harvest like combine it with harvest like you grow the plant for 95% of the time. And it’s only in the last 5% of that season that you pluck the harvest. Right? And but the value and not the value but the. Yeah, the value of the end product, the harvest is not a function of how well you harvest it, like it’s a function of how well you cultivate. Yes. And, that said, seed is only going to grow if it’s in the seed to grow. Right.

Tanner: And that’s where I feel my specific skill set is. I’m great at the cultivating. I feel I have built a really cool system to help kids do this. And now where we are struggling and we’re doing fairly well, especially this year. It’s been super exciting. I feel I’m very excited about how we’re doing and the type of outreach we’ve had, but, I need help getting sorted to the next step that like that. That’s sort of where my focus has been lately. I can cultivate and build something really cool. And now I need to I want people to know about it.

Coby: Well, the people that know about it, I’ll go on camera saying that’s the people noticed. Different light of Jenny recommend delight. Right. So, because your approach introduces a catalyst that does create real change. The great news is that your brand has a promise that you can deliver on, and that it’s rooted in actual human behavior and the way the universe really works. And the problem to overcome is that through tradition, through is through a little bit of laziness and certainly through the agenda of the financial layer that overlays all of light. Unfortunately, because, the market has adopted a view that is contrary to how people really work, and it serves a small group of entrenched individuals do maintain it’s a power structure that serves, you know, a smaller group at the top of hierarchy. And it’s probably not even really serving them that well, I think. Yeah. And that’s when it’s totally ripe for disruption when nobody’s really, truly served anyone. Yeah. So the motion, I think, for you is to paint a picture of what the end state looks like after your catalyst has changed the system. And to communicate it in a way that where your market is at, they can still consume that and understand it and are compelled and intrigued by it. And then to provide a path for them to understand how that end state can be theirs by adopting your Calvinist right. And that is the marketing motion. Yeah.

Tanner: And our vision on that. This is something Tyler and I have talked about for a while is sort we sort of landed on this line of like, you know, I was asked as I saw the other day, like, what is the future vision? What is your vision? If you do, what do you want it to look like ten years from now or whatever? And my answer to that is that I want to raise a generation of people who can create, as opposed to people who just.

Coby: consume. I was about to.

Tanner: Go, yes.

Coby: That’s literally serve versus compete in a market. Like there’s so much I love this. Yeah. Absolutely. And what does a critical thinking creator look like. And you know, have I have a lot of clients who want to get to a bigger stage in their business. And so they’ll do all the things to prepare to perform on or to compete on a stage based on how they look. But that stage looks like and they think that stage is a and competing on that bigger world stage, like a global presence or an international footprint or something, is a function of doing something different than what they’re doing now. And the insight is all a bigger stage. Is your practice enough? And what you do now that naturally you just get a little bit bigger of a space to do it. But it’s the same thing you’re doing now. It’s the same thing you were doing in your first year teaching. Yeah, you’ve been doing this since your first year. Teach, right? And even before. And as you do it and as you incrementally just maybe tweak some stuff. But the stage grows as you feel the stage that you’re on. Right. It’s not I got to do something to get there, but it works also with this idea of what does a creator look like? Yeah. Well you don’t go through an education that makes you behave. This way so that you’re prepared to act in the market, in a business environment and a job or profession in a totally different way. You got to practice that here, right? Yeah.

Tanner: And the job market wants creators.

Coby: It needs creators. Because especially now because, you know, technology and automation will take the consumption. It will take the repetition and the systematization. It will do that. It’s doing it already.

Tanner: Machines are doing that for us now.

Coby: All we now have ultimately and this is the apex like, I’d love to walk you through my behavioral spectrum and the drivers and stuff, but all we have really now is maybe not right now. Think five years would AI. All we got now is or at that point I will have is as human beings, we will have our ability to create. And that comes from the passion and the joy we have in the creation bus itself. That will be our primary. We will recognize that has always been our primary export. Yeah.

Tanner: And that approach to life comes from having autonomy.

Coby: Yes.

Tanner: And the intrinsic motivation and passion driven learning it. That’s what we want to start. Yeah. With let’s have kids learn that way.

Coby: That’s freaking. Yeah. So amazing. I want the info. I want to enroll my kids.

Tanner: Yeah.

Coby: My oldest is senior year. It’s dad. He’s on the mountain biking team. That’s not going to change. But certainly my middle child. Kind of a performing arts whatever. Oh, yeah. There is that, like. I mean, a lot of people go to high secondary, not secondary, but high school, not because of the educational opportunities but because of the, arts involvement opportunity right now, even socially. But like, so do you have an answer for that?

Tanner: All we do is. Yeah, absolutely. And that’s what we’re doing now. So there’s a few that we offer a full time high school program.

Coby: Okay.

Tanner: We have an option for you to have an optio teacher support your kid as a mentor. Cool. Or you can just do it completely as a parent. If your kid’s not ready to leave public school yet, what we do is we. You can take individual classes through optio. And since we are an accredited high school, that means.

Tanner: Right. Do the Mistborn book that I talked about earlier. Do that and get it. Get an English class through Optio and will transfer it to your high school. And since we’re an accredited school, it comes through to your counselor at your high school just the same as they would see any other transfer credit. So do the boring subjects that you don’t want to do at the public school. Do them with optio, but stay in your high school and do all the fun classes. Do all the electives. See your friends, do whatever you like to do in the public school and.

Coby: How much is up to your cost?

Tanner: For, a few different things if you want like a full time teacher support, that’s something we honestly, personalize it for each kid because every kid, some kids need daily check ins. Some kids are good with a once a week check in. So the tuition is on a scale based on what the kid needs to just do a class. It’s 150 bucks. You download our app, you do it completely through our app and track your learning. On our app. You earn a thousand experience points, in that subject. And once you’ve earned a thousand experience points, we transfer that credit to your high school.

Coby: When are you going to do this for college?

Tanner: So I’m working on it right now. That is in the works. You want to enroll in our college?

Coby: At your college, I want to be in the first class. Okay, but I’m.

Tanner: Getting dead freaking serious. Okay, I’ll send this podcast to the college I’m working with. Really? I’m so close with this college. They just want to see more numbers that we can bring them before they will commit to a partnership. But we have a few things in the works to make that happen. If we could get a couple hundred potential college students, they would say yes to a partner.

Coby: Yeah, like me. And so.

Tanner: That’s what I’m close to, one.

Coby: meeting with my friends. You’ll never have to have another fundraiser. No way. It’s a that’s going to be cut out. So.

Tanner: Yeah. No I that’s what.

Coby: Does that mean. It’s Batman the third one Harvey Dent. Yeah I know I like Harvey Dent. Yeah I just watch it with my kids.

Tanner: So I know, I just love that. Yeah.

Coby: So, this is soap. So to wrap up, going to have you’re working on college high schools ready to go. Yep. You’re going to start your third year. So this year going into your second year going we’re.

Tanner: About to start our second.

Coby: Year about to start the second year. You’re accredited. So you work with all like alpine right. Granite.

Tanner: Right.

Coby: Jordan doesn’t matter. The summit all the school districts.

Tanner: Okay. Schools in the country.

Coby: In the country. Yep. Okay. Dude, this is super exciting. Honestly, we got I want to be a part of this place.

Tanner: I would love it. Yeah.

Coby: All right.

Tanner: Absolutely.

Nicole: Thanks for coming along for the ride. If you enjoy, Sweet Takes be sure to subscribe and leave us a review. Join us next time. There’s more sweetness ahead.