You're Interested in Sora. Now what?
We’re so glad that you’re interested in applying to our school! There’s just a few things that you have to do before moving forward with our application process.
Get to Know Us
In the beginning of 2018, three Georgia Tech students came together to begin working on an ambitious project.
What would the ideal high school look like?
From their own experience in high school, Garrett Smiley, Wesley Samples, and Indra Sofian knew that schools today were completely out of date. They didn’t focus on building the right skills, they weren’t good learning environments for most students, and they didn’t prepare students for the real world. After many, many months of research and conversations with teachers, school founders, developmental biologists, entrepreneurs, and students, their findings matched their hypothesis: high school needed to be imagined from the ground up.
Thus, they started Sora Schools.
The founders gathered supporters from around the country. They brought in advisors like John Danner of Rocketship Education. On the team, they received hundreds of applications and interviewed dozens of people before selecting the final three educators for this unique program. They were education veterans of many years, coming from a variety of professional backgrounds like software engineering, public health, and philosophy. The most important quality they all shared was a growth mindset for creating a learning environment unlike any other in the world. On September 3, 2019, we welcome the inaugural class of Sora Schools.
Since then, our program has flourished. Our students have quickly grown together as a family, and they love Sora. Our educators are among our biggest promoters, and we have continued to demonstrate that the educational model we are pioneering fosters creativity, growth, and ambition in our students. Ultimately, we’re creating the next generation of leaders and changemakers at Sora, and it’s our honor to do so.
Get to Know the School
Sora is not a normal online high school. We place a big emphasis on community in our program, and that is reflected in every facet of its design. Our students meet in the morning to talk about their projects, their goals, and their day. We encourage students to work together on group projects. Students create clubs to bond and chat at all times of the day. They attend workshops together created by our team.
Watch the videos to get a feel for our culture
Now, Let's Get to Know You
Now that you know everything about us, you can schedule a meeting with our team. This is an opportunity for prospective families to ask any question they have about the program and see if Sora is a good fit for their student.
During this meeting, we encourage you to bring the whole family—we only accept students into our program if we have achieved “family fit”. That’s everyone understanding our expectations for students and parents and how the program works. Sora won’t work for you if there isn’t buy-in from everyone.
This meeting is the final step of our process. We’ll also send a form prior to scheduling the meeting that you can fill out and let us know of any information about your student that we should know. After this, we’ll let you know within a week if we accept your student into Sora!