Kristina Scala, Founder and CEO, Aspen Academy

Could you please give us a brief introduction to Aspen Academy as of today?

Aspen Academy is currently a pre-kindergarten through eighth-grade school. We’re serving kids from the ages of about four to 14 within our school. We’re about to open up an early education center, and we have just started a program by which, when students graduate at the age of 14, they’ll still be able to come back to the school for internships through high school and through college by networking with what we call the Aspen Business Leadership Community.

Basically, we formed the school by looking at the general constructs that exist within every skill—mathematics, science, literacy, history, and the core subjects. Then, we asked if early education is really effective. 

Early education not only discussed the topics but also the character of the individuals who developed those great learned exercises or created history through their inventions or in what they were and did for the world. It really began as a really strong commitment to this sense of character-building within the context of academics and then fully formed into what we now call our LiFE program. It is a program that is focused on leadership, finance and entrepreneurial development of all of our students.

At the beginning of every day, our students take an explicit curriculum that we have developed in-house, which focuses on different concentric circles of leadership. How do I lead myself? How can I be a positive and productive member of society? How can I be a contributing citizen and leader in the communities where I’m at in a very positive way?

There’s been a great push toward activism as opposed to leadership. For us, leadership is being very, very thoughtful. It’s leading from a place of kindness, of choosing to do good for this world and to take the gifts that you’ve been given, the strengths that you’ve developed, the curiosities that you have to create enormously positive solutions for as many folks as you can.

We start first with the self. What are the characteristics of a great leader? How does a great leader operate? What did they say? What did they choose not to say? What did they do, and what did they choose not to do? What is their impact on a community? What is their impact on their families and their classmates?

Then, we start to move out into social leadership. How can I contribute to optimizing the community that I’m in and doing some pretty extraordinary things where people feel cared for, nurtured, acknowledged, and appreciated? Then, we start to move out from that center into the next circle of civic leadership. What is one’s civic responsibility? And so those leadership skills are honed in a class every single morning.

We then move out into another subject, finance, and there are a number of financial literacy programs. We aim to help the kiddos live in the context of real life right here at school. Each classroom has its own mini economy, whereby not only do they understand the financial components and financial systems and develop the acumen of some fairly basic skills of earning, spending, saving, investing and considering philanthropy, but they’re actually living it through the day. It is the means and constancy of the conversation throughout the day that helps them understand. 

When we think about it, reading is something that we all do every day, right? As such, every school teaches reading because you’re always going to run into reading. However, the other thing that your life is going to encounter for the vast majority of human beings is money. You’re going to have some encounter with it every single day in your adult life, whether you need to put gas in your car, get coffee or whatever the case might be. Understanding how it works and the economic levers that create different kinds of monetary situations in one’s life, community and the country becomes a very big part of successful living. As such, we engage in financial and economic literacy throughout those 10 years.

Finally, in the third component of entrepreneurship, we tend to believe that studies about a human being’s creative quotient show that in most Western societies, creativity peaks at the age of about four to five, and then it precipitously drops the longer an individual is in school. Our hope is to keep our kiddos in a space of curiosity, fascination and wonder as well as develop the confidence and the courage as well as the discernment to be able to look at a situation and say, “Here’s where it is, and here’s where it could be,” to be able to identify the gap and then to reach inside themselves, to reach out to friends and to talk about it to figure out a solution to find that gap. Ultimately, that’s what entrepreneurs are. We just simply find the gap.

We consistently allow kiddos the opportunity to be not only problem identifiers but also problem solvers and to dive into the natural escalation of their questions. You’ve been around a three-year-old. Why? Why? Why? Letting those whys keep coming allows our kiddos to grow up in a culture where they see themselves not as somebody who’s going to be told what to do but as somebody who is going to create solutions that will allow people to do what the most that they can do.

The kiddos will start their first business when they’re five years of age with their grade-level classmates. Then, as it moves through the years, they’ll start to move into small group businesses. By the time they are graduating eighth grade, which is at 14 years of age, they have developed their own solo entrepreneur business. They pitch it to an investment group. If you’ve seen “Shark Tank,” it’s something along those lines. They pitch it into the “Shark Tank” for real monies and real investment. By the time you graduate from Aspen Academy, you have created at least nine businesses. Through that process, you are mentored by other leaders, entrepreneurs, business owners, CEOs and what have you in developing your idea and executing that idea.

As a result, you walk into the next chapter of your world with a high level of understanding of your personal integrity and efficacy. It’s that sense of knowing who you are and what you stand for and that you can figure out just about everything that comes your way. Those are skills, and to have curiosity, joyfulness and pragmatic optimism, you must be able to go after what’s in front of you in life. 

The article is already there. I can definitely see it. It’s very impressive that you have created a curriculum that can deliver all of these before kids become adults. Actually, I’m curious. If we follow your students, let’s say, 10 or 20 years ahead and see what they have become, many of them want to study MBAs. Maybe they would just go ahead and start their own companies and be successful by the age of 20. I’m very curious about that. Do you have any scenarios and success cases that come to mind? 

We have, and those kiddos are now in their early and mid-twenties and making their way out into the world. Many of them have chosen a collegiate path. They have earned extraordinary scholarships, not just because of their academic acumen but also because of how they present themselves in the world. They tend to be very individualistic thinkers. 

They have the courage to choose unique things. We have kiddos who’ve gone on to become patent attorneys because they really understood the value of creating and inventing or individuals who have created businesses all over the world. One of our kiddos we were just talking about last week is helping to develop the National Football League in China. It was interesting because when he went to high school, he had decided that he wanted to have a foreign exchange program specifically for China, and his high school unequivocally told him, “No, we don’t do that.” 

However, he had come up from Aspen Academy, and at Aspen Academy, if there is something that you have a burning yearning for inside of you, there is a way. He managed to convince his high school to let him do a foreign exchange program in China. It’s a really interesting life, and he’s doing something enormously unique for a 25-year-old kiddo.

I think about that part of the story. You’re at the time when you are young. Each of us tells most of the story about who we are as a person. By the time we’re about 14, we decide what our lenses on the world and ourselves are. Are we somebody who can figure it out? Are we somebody who can persevere through the hard moments? Are we willing to jump over the hurdles that come our way? Are our mom and dad going to bubble-wrap us and pave the way? Our parents tend to be parents who want to prepare their child for the path versus the path for the child. 

They have a lot of internal resources and a lot of drive, and they’re interested. I always say that the most interesting people are interested in questions like they’re interested in others. Interesting people are interested in others, and so they are perpetual askers of great questions. They are constantly inquiring. They’re wondering, and they’re pushing the margins. We’ve seen that time and time again in the graduates of Aspen Academy.

For the purpose of this article, we should definitely focus on LiFE—leadership, finance and entrepreneurship—which are unique concepts I haven’t heard of, especially working with these age groups. We can definitely focus on them. I will need to touch base a little bit about community engagement as well. You mentioned activism versus leadership, and I find that a very interesting idea. Could you elaborate a little bit more about Aspen Academy’s community engagement?

There are a number of schools that have started to really want to develop activism. Activism, for activism’s sake, can be highly divisive and very polarizing. We’re seeing that throughout our world right now. However, we want people who can engage in civic discourse. We solve problems when we can sit across the table together in a collegial way.

When we can define our end in mind together and collaborate on what an end in mind could look like, it could serve all people well who know how to listen and who know how to speak. In most schools, you need your Language Arts Program. It’s called Language Arts. For us, it’s called communications and literacy.

We are focused on developing great communicators, and great communication starts with listening—empathic listening. It starts with the kind of listening that allows one to really open up one’s mind and see where this individual is coming from, by what historical context are they coming from, what cultural perspective, and to really lean into a cultural competency that allows you to listen, not just with your head but with your heart so that you can hope to create connection in a way that allows you to come together to create a solution.

And Kristina, what will be the final message that you would like to send across?

Let me think about that. However, let me offer something else because there’s another part of this program that is quite unique. There is an organization by the name of America Succeeds that has developed a framework called the Durable Skills Framework, and I’m happy to send it to you. 

What we have done is overlaid all of these particular skills into all aspects of our learning, including leadership, finance and entrepreneurship. It also cuts across communications and literacy as well as mathematics and science, inventions and what have you? It’s a framework called durable skills, and it focuses on character, mindfulness, metacognition, leadership, growth mindset, fortitude, critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration.

We are working with this Durable Skills Framework to ensure that each of our students is developing durable skills that they will take into adulthood. Many schools have moved to a construct of “I’m going to teach you content that may or may not be relevant in real life. You’re going to sit, and you’re going to memorize the information, and then you are going to regurgitate it for some exam that really is not consequential.”

What we are looking to do not just in the 10 years that we have with the kids but also in the many years after that they continue to re-engage with us after they graduate is to continue to hone these durable skills that have been identified as the most critical skills for successful adulthood.

Is there anything I haven’t asked you about that you would like to mention?

I’d like to send you this as part of the overview because I think it’s going to be very important for us. It is the web and weave by which all of our work comes. In the end, when we think about what that end statement is, we want to develop extraordinary leaders who know how to take good care of themselves and who have an inclination and a capacity to care for others. Ultimately, that is our aim. We want to develop individuals who are highly self-sustaining but can also create great opportunities for others.

What is your vision for Aspen Academy in the next three to five years?

Our vision is to touch the lives of thousands and thousands of young people as they embark on their personal life journey and to support them in their personal and civic leadership development skills to be financially sustaining and also financially generative for the world, as well as to be great creators in this world, to be wonderful entrepreneurial thinking individuals who can apply that sense of wonder and that ability to see and to fill the gap across all constructs and in all industries.