Lee Rippy, founder

I grew up in a small private school in Virginia. In second grade I was diagnosed with dysgraphia. The school gave me the specialized help I needed, and because of it I graduated from the College of Business at East Carolina University in 2011. I know what a small school that fits a child can do, because one did it for me.

My wife and I homeschool our two kids. We are advocates for school choice.

A friend who co-founded Redeemer Classical, a hybrid classical school in Phoenix, had looked for software that fit her school's model and could not find any. She asked me to build a library system. So Pearspark began as a barcode book-checkout tool: scan the book, scan the card, done.

Then she asked for volunteer management. Then grades. After the third request I stopped answering one at a time and went all in on a full school platform. The first commit is dated June 6, 2026. Redeemer was running on it by July.

I did not set out to fix school administration. A school asked me for software, and I kept saying yes.

Every student works and learns differently, and every school operates differently because of that fact. That is the whole philosophy behind Pearspark. It is why families keep starting schools that are built different: classical, Montessori, hybrid, co-op, microschool. The people who start them are teachers first and office staff by necessity. The software a small school can afford should not be the reason it fails.

So Pearspark bends to how a school is built instead of forcing one model on it, and it costs what a small school can pay. The price is public, and everything is in it.