A school being built by someone who needed it.

Soren DeOrlow is the founder of 01 Academy. He is also, more relevantly: an alumnus of a north San Diego County Christian school, the son of a family that helped build the campus he later attended, and the father of young children growing up in the same corridor today.

He is, in other words, exactly the parent who would be looking for a school like 01 Academy. He could not find one. So he is building it.

The convergence

01 Academy is the convergence of three threads.

A graduate education at the University of Southern California — three years across the Iovine & Young Academy, the Viterbi School of Engineering, and the Marshall School of Business — distilled into five themes: Product, Data, Systems, Ethics, and Research. That work lives publicly at sorendeorlow.vercel.app.

An applied exploration of exponential technologies, product design, and digital transformation — published openly at longitudinal.ai, where an ethical compass for innovation has been argued, sentence by sentence, in public.

And the conviction — native to a Christian education, and reinforced by living and working in this century — that the formation of a young person is the formation of a soul, and that no curriculum that ignores this fact will be equal to the moment we are in.

These three threads are why 01 Academy exists. They are also why it can only be built by someone who carries all three in the same body.

Why north San Diego County

Because this is where the founder's life is. His own school days were in this corridor. His parents made things — quietly and at scale — on a campus not far from where 01 Academy will likely take root. His children are growing up in the same corridor now.

The Carlsbad-through-Carmel-Valley stretch has a density of faith communities, innovation talent, and ambitious families that few American regions can match. The existing schools in the corridor are excellent in the work they do. 01 Academy is offering a kind of work no school in the corridor is currently doing.

Why now

Because the children who will graduate high school in 2030 are sitting in classrooms today that were designed for a world that has already ended. We do not have ten years to debate the curriculum. Our children are in school right now.

On phones, attention, and formation

The school you are reading about will be a phone-free school. That commitment did not arrive late or as a marketing gesture. It is downstream of what the school is for. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation, has argued for four norms families and schools should hold the line on. We name where 01 Academy stands on each.

• No smartphones before high school. We enroll grades 9–12, so the introduction of the smartphone is upstream of us. Where we counsel families, the research and our convictions point in the same direction: the longer the better.
• No social media before 16. The school will not require, recommend, or build coursework around social media. We treat the absence of student social media as a feature of the formation, not a deficit to be worked around.
• Phone-free schools, bell to bell. Devices stored — Yondr or equivalent — for the entirety of the school day, including lunch and unstructured time. Coursework requires no student smartphone; the tools the work needs are provided by the school.
• More independence, free play, real-world responsibility. The Innovation Challenge curriculum is built on this premise: real interviews with real people, tangible prototypes built by hand, public pitches delivered in person. Once a year, the cohort spends a week in the field — see Field Week in the manifesto.

These commitments are not policies we will have to defend against student or parent objection. They are the natural shape of a faith-rooted school formed around embodied work. We are not enforcing attention. Attention is what we are for.

— Soren DeOrlow, founder