Founding high school principal launches AI-fueled education business

One of the most important things to know about Marlee Strawn, whose career has jumped from teacher to founding principal of a high school to her current role, is that, despite all this, it took her a while to accept the title of innovator. 

The co-founder of Tampa-based education technology startup Scholar Education, Strawn, 38, as always seen herself as more of a problem-solver, someone who could easily put the puzzle pieces together to reach a solution. But that didn’t immediately signify, to her, “one who innovates.” 

“Recently, I’ve been more reflective and realized that I am a creative person,” she says. “I’m a creative problem-solver. Just because, by definition, most people don’t put that as an innovator, I had to kind of reframe my thought process about it all.” 

While Strawn may have come to that self-assessment on a delay, the outward trajectory of her career shows someone immediately interested in making an impact on their industry, and influencing others. She graduated from USF in 2009 with the goal of becoming a teacher. Unlike today, when teacher shortages are a widely-known reality, 15 years ago the market was different — and not one of her fellow classmates could find a teaching job. 

A stroke of luck at her internship meant Strawn landed a full-time opening as a high school history teacher. There, she taught Advanced Placement World History, AP Psychology and AP European History. Even from the beginning, she had a remarkable level of success, receiving a statewide award for social studies teaching. 

But she wanted more. 

“I loved what I was doing in the classroom, but I wanted to help teachers with these same strategies,” she said. “And that’s what motivated me to become an administrator, but I always had this unique ability to be a critical thinker and a problem solver, and I think that has translated in thinking outside the box and having the ability to not do what is the norm and meet the kids where they’re at in different ways and support them in different ways.” 

Her joke was always that she didn’t have a particular talent — she couldn’t sing, she didn’t dance, but her special skill lay in her ability to zoom out and see the entire picture. Her students used to kid that she really did have eyes in the back of her head. 

Opportunity calls

After working nearly a decade in Hillsborough schools and rising through the ranks to become assistant principal of curriculum, Strawn made her next shift as founding principal of Tampa charter Dr. Kiran C. Patel High School. It didn’t fall in her lap — instead, while reading an article about the charter’s approval, she realized the school had everything that interested her: project-based learning, a Cambridge International Education program, the opportunity to build something from the ground up. 

“I just sent them an email saying, ‘Here’s everything about me and this is why I want to be the principal,’” she says. “Something told me this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build a school from scratch.”

In much the same way, her decision to co-found Scholar Education with serial entrepreneur Ed Buckley III came through a combination of serendipity and timing. 

By the time Buckley contacted her to meet about a potential education technology initiative, Strawn was already navigating the nuances of generative AI on a school level as a principal. With the public emergence of ChatGPT in November 2022, teachers were coming to her with concerns about students cheating in a way they had never seen before. 

“The kids were already 10 steps ahead of us,” she says. “I’m a self-proclaimed techie, and I’ve always leveraged technology to do my job in a variety of ways. But that triggered me to create my first account and start playing around. Immediately, I was like, this is probably the most powerful technology we have seen in quite some time.” 

Buckley, for his part, saw classrooms as the next frontier for AI-based technology, particularly after 2023 Florida legislation broadly expanded access to school choice vouchers. A friend suggested he reach out to Strawn, and they immediately clicked. And even though he contacted roughly 30 people to get feedback and insight, it was Strawn who became the clear front-runner as a partner in the project. 

“When you put together my background and my need for someone with her background, it was a beautiful marriage of synergies,” Buckley says. “She was curious and hungry for new things and to be proven wrong.” 

Scholar Education launched in 2023 with one teacher and a classroom of 150 seventh-graders. With that class’ feedback, Buckley and Strawn tweaked the first product. That was BaxterBot, a generative AI tool in the form of one of Buckley’s dogs that works as a sort of individualized tutor for each student, trained on their usage and the teacher’s comments. Now, the AI tool includes both BaxterBot and PAWfessor Bruce, offering teachers help with lesson plans and insights from student performance. 

Eventually, Scholar Education received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education that has allowed it to offer the product for free to schools. If that were to run out, the plan is to offer the tool on a subscription model. 

New phase

In the early days of the startup, Strawn began to really understand in a micro way what it meant to innovate. Even as a founding principal at Patel, there was a general path, she says, and a barometer for making good decisions: is this what’s best for the kids? As head of a tech company, instead, “there are a lot of paths to success and a lot of paths to failure.” 

“You’re kind of constantly asking yourself, are you making the right decision?” she says. “I don’t have a technical background, obviously, and I have just taken complete ownership over my own learning of how to leverage AI in every capacity. So I am doing things and building things I’ve never thought I would even be saying out loud.” 

In her day-to-day work, Strawn remains in a constantly innovating phase. For example, in just the last few months, Scholar Education has made a big shift: rather than K-12 education, its new focus will be special education, building the capacity to handle every phase, from diagnostic evaluations to Individualized Education Plans. 

“No one is really innovating special education, but that’s where this huge gap is,” Buckley says. “Getting there was not a natural pass, but Marlee is so good at being connected to the teachers and listening, and that’s where the innovation ended up taking us.” 

Strawn may still be reluctant to fully call herself an innovator, but she can easily name what it takes to be an innovator: being okay with failure. 

“Most of the time, you’re learning the most through your failures,” she says. “Your successes are not going to teach you as much about the journey. I would say that, when you’re an innovator, you have to be okay with trying new things and being okay with failing.”