Letter from the founders
I began working with San Francisco public schools while conducting research with SFUSD on rezoning and school assignment, focused on how district boundaries and enrollment policies shape equitable access to opportunity. I spent time close to the day-to-day realities, sitting with educators and staff as they tried to support students through real constraints: limited time, tight budgets, and competing priorities that never let up. What stayed with me was how often the barrier was not willpower or creativity, but capacity. Even excellent ideas struggled to survive contact with the school calendar.
That experience made something clear to me over time. Schools are mission-driven, and so are many education companies. Both want to offer students more than the basics and more than what already exists. But expanding what students can access is rarely just a curriculum challenge. It is an operations challenge: finding and vetting the right mentors, supporting them over time, coordinating schedules across time zones, communicating with families, tracking progress, and keeping quality consistent across cohorts.
Alicia had been seeing this up close for years from another angle. For more than a decade, she has volunteered teaching computer science to underserved students across five nonprofit organizations, showing up consistently even while working full time in technology and later consulting. Through work across fifteen-plus organizations, she saw the same pattern repeatedly: the biggest constraint was not demand but operational capacity. The solution was not to centralize everything in a few large players, but to make it possible for smaller schools and education companies to deliver high-quality programs without carrying the full burden alone.
So we started Nova Learning.
Expectations from families keep rising, but time and staffing are not catching up. The gap is not ambition. It is execution.
We take on the operational lift behind academic programs that are additive to a school or education company’s core offering, so partners can expand what they provide without expanding their team. We run the unglamorous but essential parts that determine whether a program succeeds: recruiting and supporting a team of hundreds of instructors, building a repeatable program structure, coordinating schedules across time zones, managing family communication, tracking progress, and maintaining a high quality bar across cohorts.
Partners keep the student relationships and trust they have built, while students gain access to meaningful learning opportunities regardless of where they start.
- Natasha & Alicia
