Our Advisory Team
John Danner
John co-founded Rocketship Education, where he served as CEO from 2005 to 2013. Rocketship combined classroom and online teaching serving 3,500 students across 7 schools and became the highest-performing low-income school system in California. John advises Sora on organizational development and school processes.
Linda Leftrict
A veteran in virtual education, Linda was a member of the leadership team for the largest global higher education network with Laureate Education for over 10 years. She was an Executive Vice President at Connections Academy and a consultant with K12 on innovative learning models and student experience.
Lisa McGuire
Lisa McGuire has served as a teacher, department chair, and director of admissions for schools for multiple years. At King’s Ridge Christian School in Georgia, she helped acquire partnerships and impactful resources for the school as part of their experiential education, encouraging students to take on internships while in school.
Our Faculty
Brandy Daniels
Lead Counselor
Brandy is a Certified Professional Coach (CPC) who holds a master’s degree in public health with a focus on behavioral sciences and health education from Emory University, Atlanta, GA, and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Miami University, Oxford, OH. Her mission as a counselor is to help her students realize their strengths, and embrace who they are so they can confidently navigate through changes in their life or career.
Michael Granado
Lead Humanities Expert
Michael has an extensive educational background in the humanities, paired with 5 years of teaching experience at high school and college levels. Michael is currently a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Staffordshire University, and has earned a M.T.S in Historical Theology from Emory University. He works with students on their individual projects, while simultaneously educating them in writing, reading, critical thinking, and other humanities related skills needed to excel in their future endeavors.
Carolyn Reeves
Lead STEM Expert
Carolyn started off her career as a software engineer. Eventually, she decided to get her Masters in Mathematics and moved into teaching, serving as a high school math teacher in multiple schools. As a teacher, she believes in making math project-based and teaching real skills like coding in the classroom. Carolyn is working with students on their individual projects, while also helping them incorporate math and science skills.
Our Founders
The idea for Sora came from a simple question: What would the high school of the future 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. Yet, they had succeeded in spite of that.
After many, many months of research on education and conversations with teachers, school founders, developmental biologists, entrepreneurs, and high school students, they realized that their findings matched their hypothesis: high school needed to be imagined from the ground up.
Thus, they started Sora Schools.