About Us
Our Story
Our Story
Who we are
Sheyda is from Logan, Utah. Her mom is from there as well, and her dad moved there from Tehran, Iran, to study at Utah State University. I was born in Brazil but mostly raised in Mesa, AZ, and went to Mountain View High school. My dad is from Prescott, AZ, and my mom is from Sao Paulo, Brazil, and her parents are from Japan. Sheyda and I met in Glendale, AZ, while she was attending Midwestern University to become a doctor and I was studying in my MBA program at Thunderbird. After graduating I went into corporate banking in Houston while she continued on finishing her medical program bouncing around to different states. Being young and naïve, we figured we had gotten done with the hard stuff and were building a pretty good future for ourselves.
Ezra
Ezra, our first child, was born a few years after we got married. Some people say you can’t really tell early on if your child is autistic, but we knew within a few months that something was up. As a baby he didn’t show the slightest interest in us and could not be comforted by us. He just screamed all of the time. I remember taking him out in public for the first time after a few months, that outing lasted less than 15 minutes before he had a meltdown. If it was this difficult for us as parents to handle, we can’t imagine someone else taking care of our child. It was set that Sheyda would be a stay-at-home mom, which was the harder job, trust me.
Back to AZ
We moved back to Arizona for me to join my dad’s tax preparation business and be close to family. I really enjoy the work, I find it very fun, but best of all I enjoy the freedom of being self employed and having a very seasonal job. This allowed me to help out a lot at home when it wasn’t tax season. We enrolled Ezra in school and into therapies. Isaiah our second child was also diagnosed with autism and then also speech apraxia. We commuted 5-6 hours a day bouncing around to therapies. We kept this up over the next several years while in the meantime Ammon and Emma were born a couple years apart.
Time for change
A pivotal moment came as I was being a helicopter parent and spying on Ezra from the parking lot at his school during recess. I saw him playing out there with the other kids with disabilities when they released the typical students. It was disturbing to see the other kids go right up to Ezra and start hitting him in the head with the plastic shovels and throwing sand in his face. It was a situation that after talking with the school seemed like it would be difficult to address continually. We interviewed many schools and didn’t find a place that felt right for us.
Starting a school
We found ourselves in a unique position. I owned a small office building next to my dad’s tax office and Sheyda and I had saved just enough money up until this point to be able buy materials and hire teachers to start a school. I also worked at a tax office, and the state of Arizona allowed tax credit donations towards helping kids attend private schools. This allowed many tax clients help with actually starting and keeping the school running. We put all of our savings into the school and we were off on making a school for our kids and anyone else interested in joining in. Sheyda then went back to school to get her Montessori teaching certificate and master’s in education degree. Now that she has completed that, I am now enrolled in a doctoral program in educational leadership. We try to stay on top of what is going on in the world to best help prepare these kids for the future.
From then to now
We started with only 3 students and by the end of the school year we had 9 students. The second year we had 19 students and by the 3rd year we were at 25. By the fourth year we were around 40 students and due to the financial and space constraints we have been at same enrollment up until this current 6th year. We have moved from the small little office to inside our home, to a 2-acre property, and now we are in a guest house on a 4-acre property. With the help of my mom, we bought a 4-acre empty lot of our own in 2021 in the hopes of moving the school there. Prices have been out of our reach to actually build anything there, but we have hopes that in the future things will work themselves out and we will have a place of our own. So for now we will continue having school in the guest house of our wonderful landlord.
Daily
The school has become one big family. We have students ranging from 3 years old to 14 years old. Everyone hangs out together, helps each other out, and gets on each other’s nerves, it is a wonderful place. We try to help kids find the best in themselves, enjoy the environment, and prepare them for the future. Many of them want to come back to work at the school someday. We will keep the school going as long as possible.