admin There are major changes in the past few decades with respect to education. Although Julie Young’s work has advanced into education, she was always following her north star: finding ways to help students succeed.
Managing director of ASU Preparatory Academy, Julie Young, grown up in Lexington, Kentucky and graduated high school in 1999. After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Kentucky, she began her teaching career at San Carlos Park Elementary, a Fort Myers Elementary School. She tells the growing up of her school community as “leave it to the beavers” – tidy and idyllic. She moved to Florida at age 21, got married and raised two sons while she pursued her interest in finding ways to improve educational outcomes with technology. He also earned a master’s degree in administration and supervision at the University of South Florida.
At the time when Young and his colleagues began to apply IBM grants to schools that they started to follow a path in “ed tech”. He worked within public schools to try out techniques that helped different methods of writing and reading instruction. And the results were phenomenal.
Young said, “We had tremendous results, huge success. Students loved it; parents loved it. Absence went down. Student results went up, and so I had the opportunity to see it in real time That’s what it was, how it worked, if you could personalize the education experience.”
The whole thing changed before Young arranged a meeting to train other teachers on how to use the technical equipment.
The assistant superintendent of Orange County Public Schools asked her to be the principal of Florida’s first online school. Initially funded by a grant, Young observed that the project was met with skepticism. The assistant superintendent was in need of someone who was willing to take a fresh approach and design a school around the needs of the children, not traditional practices. And then, young became the founding chairman and CEO of Florida Virtual School.
“I always say, ‘Which principal in their right mind would quit their day job in 1996 to take a grant-funded job as a virtual principal to build a web school?” he said. “But for me, it was like, ‘Oh, I’d love to do this.’ Based on the work I’m doing; it was right up my alley.”
At the first Florida virtual school team meeting in 1996, they decided that a few essentials had to alter for their model to work: the calendar needed to be flexible, allowing students to enroll and graduate whenever they wanted; Education was to be made personal to all; Parents had to be partners; And the student-teacher relationship involved more coaching and getting to know students and their needs.
Young said, “It was really awesome to be able to come into this with a new perspective, what would change if we put the student at the center of the design of this new program? And if we at carte blanche around this medium- Had the potential to completely change education around, how would we do things differently? And what we learned has changed a lot.”
“We saw a lot of students, a lot of kids, just blooming,” Young told. “What we learned was also a lot of trial and error. It’s not easy, designing courses, redesigning them, and redesigning them.
The school’s success grew state-wide and then, ultimately reaching 50. Served over 2 mn students in states and 68 countries worldwide. Simultaneously, Young Ed became an in-demand specialist in the potential of tech and personalized learning. She also helped pass a Florida law which requires high school students to take an online course as a graduation requirement, which she sees as an essential post-secondary skill.
Her family first saw the significance of the need when both of her sons had trouble with a required online class in college. Young informed that given the ubiquity of online training, education and professional development, online learning is a life skill.
“If you look at it more broadly, it’s really about being successful in life. I mean, corporate training is done in online classes. Most corporations have a significant portion of their workforce working remotely. And they use technology to do their meetings. So, it wasn’t really just for college, but it was really for career and life.”
Young instructs some entrepreneurial education and technology organizations during pandemic that parents and teachers became very familiar with by 2020, including Dreambox Learning, the US Distance Learning Association, Aurora Institute, and Western Governors University.
Young united with ASU in 2017 to launch ASU Prep Digital, an online school that now serves K-12 students and school partners worldwide. The accredited, rigorous virtual program prepares students for college and delivers a personalized and unique learning opportunity for all students. Currently, Young leads the ASU Preparatory Academy tuition-free charter schools, serving preschool through 12th grade students on the Four Valley campuses and Casa Grande.
When schools started to switch to virtual learning in 2020, ASU Prep Digital offered Free Training for Arizona Teachers to share best practices and tips for a quick pivot to virtual learning, and launched the first ever full-time online option for kindergarteners through eighth grade Via ASU Prep Digital.
Since joining ASU, Young has been working on bringing college courses at no cost to students, launching a new digital elementary school program, and helping Arizona schools during COVID-19 disruptions with the Arizona Virtual Teacher Institute. Which is very satisfying.
“I am extremely proud of the way we were able to support teachers and schools across the board during the height of the pandemic, not just in our network but across the state. We were extremely honored to be funded by the Governor’s Office, ADE (Arizona Department of Education) and the Helios Foundation to deliver free professional development to thousands of teachers across the state through our newly formed AZ Virtual Teacher Institute,” she added.
Young earned a lot of recognition as a leading expert in online education, with Harold W. McGraw Jr. Award, the Florida Diversity Council’s Multicultural Leadership Award and has been featured as a top innovator and influencer in ed tech.
However, it was not always easy for education administration to come down an unconventional path in a field where women are underrepresented among the leadership.
“You know, in the early years, it was very lonely,” she said. “I was like a fish out of water.”
Being new to the district and getting trained as a primary teacher were factors in this. Young was also leading an unconventional web-based initiative, and she was one of very few women among secondary administrators.
“If you look at primary principals, there are many more women in primary principal roles. And then when you go to middle school, and you go to high school, there are many more men, and many of those men are coaching. Came out of the world and was with Jilla for years. I was a totally weird woman,” she said.
ASU Student Life Reporter Austin Davis contributed to this story.
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