Schola is an online guide and marketplace for students to match with different PK-12 schools.
Students can learn about and even apply to various public, private, and charter schools on the platform. Jaime Martinez was working in marketing after college when he decided to switch careers completely and sign up for Teach for America to help teach underserved students in 2010."Being an immigrant myself, I wanted to be that one teacher that I had growing up that saw an opportunity to do more for me, and I wanted to give back to my own community," said Martinez.
But during his time teaching, he saw how students could fall behind in class if they weren't being engaged with using the learning style that was best for them, he said. He began recommending alternative schools and programs to parents, even facing backlash from his own principal, until he decided to leave teaching and work as a marketing director for charter schools.
After a few years in this role, Martinez decided to go out on his own in 2015 and founded a marketing agency for these schools, which later evolved into the basis for a new startup, Schola. The company was accepted into the Seed Spot accelerator program in 2016 and hired the team's new chief marketing officer Carlos Melendez out of the experience.
On Schola, students can take an online quiz to get matched with a school that meets their specific learning needs, such as hybrid and online education, college preparatory classes, and even special education accommodations like schools with trained teachers and extra time accommodations for exams. Schools can simultaneously use the platform as a way to increase their enrollment reach, and can pay for different-tiered recruitment campaigns or data analytic tools.