— Our founders
Why we built it
Every small academy we have worked in runs on the same patchwork: a spreadsheet that is really the roster, a shared drive that is really the policy library, an inbox that is really the admissions pipeline, and one person holding the shape of it in her head. It works, right up until she is off sick.
The tools that would fix it were built for districts with an IT department to run them, priced for institutions ten times the size, and shaped like the org chart of a company nobody here works for. So they get bought, half-implemented, and quietly abandoned — and the spreadsheet comes back.
We think the reason is that those systems ask a school to learn them. A director does not have a spare week, and she should not need one. She should be able to say what she needs in the words she would use with a colleague, and have the system do it, ask her the questions it genuinely needs answered, and refuse to do the thing that would put her out of ratio.
That last part is the one we care most about. Software that does what it is told quickly is not a gift to a school; software that knows what a request implies for staffing, for compliance, for the family on the other end — that is worth having. It is why every capability here is an interface before it is a screen, why every action is written down with a name against it, and why a person answers when you write.
— Justin Connor & Kia Bell
Justin Connor
Founder & Chief Architect
Justin has spent fifteen-plus years in platform engineering and enterprise transformation — Fortune-500 integrations and the unglamorous work of making large organizations' systems actually talk to each other. Master's work at Harvard, dual bachelor's degrees from UC Irvine, and a founder's habit of building the thing instead of recommending someone else build it.
He writes the platform. Every business object gets a versioned API covering its whole lifecycle before a screen ever consumes it, every action a school takes is written to an audit trail, and anything an assistant can do is something a person could have clicked — which is what makes an AI capability safe to hand a school in the first place.
Kia Bell
Co-Founder & Chief Growth Officer
Kia comes to 1EDU from the daily work of early childhood education. She consults on curriculum, staff training, and operations for a learning center where she previously served as a lead toddler teacher. Her work includes scheduling, compliance, staffing, and the systems required to keep an early childhood program running.
She is an Ed.M. candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where her work sits at the intersection of child development, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Through her Kia Bell Books imprint, she writes and publishes children's books, giving her experience building educational products from the creator's side as well.
At 1EDU, Kia grounds product decisions in how schools actually operate. She brings the practitioner's perspective to how features are designed and how they fit into staff workflows — and takes that same perspective outward, because growth in this market is one practitioner talking to another.
Join us
Interested in our platform and would like to hear more about joining our team? Send us a note.
Write to support@1edu.app and it reaches the two of us.