SNAP U! Origins and Some Personal Background

I came up with the concept for this non-profit school with my kids Zoe, Casey and Brayden in 2012.  Zoe, the oldest, was the type of student who could follow the system track really well.  She is very smart and fit into the typical educational system easily.  She is now a special education school teacher and very successful!  Casey was 2 years younger and I saw early on that he was quite different.  Very talented with art and music.  Outside the box thinker.  Smart, quick and innovative in his thinking.  Rebellious because he never accepted the conventional wisdom.  But he also thought things through more slowly and struggled with reading.

I saw Casey and a lot of his friends start to mess around with drugs.  These were good kids.  Smart, funny, creative (of course, not all of them, but many).  So sad to see that they had a feeling of malaise, and a sense that the system was not for them.  It was not so much that they were not opting to hop on the train, but that the conductor was throwing them off!  The railroad didn’t like their “kind” on their trains.  Sad to think of this.

This is when I started really thinking about an alternative school to help captivate and motivate these kids to thrive and find their “inner best.”

SNAP U! is Born!

Casey made me a draft logo that we were planning to continue fine tuning.  And I started putting together a curriculum.  In the middle of all this, sadly, we lost my buddy Casey to a heroin overdose on September 11, 2014.  He had graduated high school that year, had a good job and had just moved into his own apartment a few weeks before.  I have dedicated SNAP U! to Casey’s memory.  I don’t want kids to feel the sadness and frustration that Casey felt as they look out at the big world facing them after high school.