Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Thales Academy Franklin’s Principal Rachael Bradley in-studio to talk about the school’s effective school calendar and affordable tuition.
Leahy: We are delighted to welcome to our microphones good friend, the head administrator of Thales Academy Franklin, Rachael Bradley. Good morning, Rachael.
Bradley: Good morning, Mike!
Leahy: It is a delight to have you on our program here. We’ve known each other now for about three years. You first came here, you were an experienced teacher.
Bradley: Correct.
Leahy: In Thales Academy, when it got started in North Carolina. And you were there. Right now, there are about nine schools in North Carolina.
Bradley: Oh, we’re upwards of 13, Mike, and more underway.
Leahy: Growing like crazy.
Bradley: Growing by leaps and bounds.
Leahy: And we went out, a couple of friends and I went out and visited with Bob Luddy in North Carolina, I believe it would have been March of 2019, and spent a day there.
And the upshot of that is, hey, Bob, you need to have one of these great high-quality, affordable schools here in Nashville. And we persuaded him to come out here for a little visit in July of 2019. I remember that very well.
Bradley: I do, too.
Leahy: You came out here and you gave a great presentation. And I went over to Bob Luddy and I said, can we get her to come out here and help us out? (Bradley chuckles)
At that time, I thought that seems like a little bit of a long shot, but it turns out you kind of had a desire to move to Nashville.
Bradley: Who wouldn’t want to live in Nashville? It’s a great place to be. And then when I found out our campus would be in Franklin, that sealed the deal.
Leahy: Sealed the deal. So what happened then is he came here. We had a very good informational meeting in July of 2019. It was actually in an area of South Nashville where we held a meeting.
A nice church there would allow us to use their facilities. We were thinking at the time, where is this going to be located? Where is it going to be located?
And then they picked Franklin, which turned out to be the perfect location. You’re very close to the intersection of 96 and 65, just off Carothers and right across from the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.
Bradley: That’s right. Our location is much more pleasant than the DMV. And it’s such a great location. We have families who drive from Nolensville, Spring Hill, Columbia, and Nashville.
Leahy: All around.
Bradley: I think that speaks to what a great option we are for families.
Leahy: And what’s interesting about this is, several things about Thales Academy are different. Right now, you’re Pre-K through 5 this year, right?
Bradley: Correct.
Leahy: And you have about 300 students.
Bradley: This year we have about 211, and we’ll have about 320 next year.
Leahy: And so next academic year begins in July. You’ll be pre-K through 6th then.
Bradley: We will.
Leahy: Wow.
Bradley: Sixth grade is exciting. And that is the grade level where we still have space available.
Leahy: There’s still space.
Bradley: If you need an alternative to public middle school, which can be a scary place for parents …
Leahy: It can be.
Bradley: … and if you want a small, safe community environment, then we’re the place for you.
Leahy: Thalesacademy.org. Go there and then just click on Franklin. You can learn all the details. Now, what’s interesting about this is it’s a year-round school, but you have like three or four-week vacations throughout. Parents seem to like that a lot, don’t they?
Bradley: Parents do like it a lot, and teachers love it and students love it. I can’t say enough about our calendar. I did have the experience of teaching in a traditional public school for six years, and I would never want to go back to that schedule.
This year-round schedule, I tell everyone it’s still 185 school days, but rather than a long summer, we split that time up. So we have four quarters. Each quarter is nine weeks with a three-week break in between.
Leahy: Until I learned about how you use this year-round calendar with the big three-week breaks three or four times a year, I wasn’t convinced. As a kid growing up in public school, I loved summer, but I found something very interesting when you told me about learning retention.
Bradley: Yes.
Leahy: And that’s critical. Tell us about that.
Bradley: We don’t have the long summer melt where we’re starting over every school year. I’ve said this many times. If we teach lesson 45 in math on Friday before our three-week fall break, when we come back on Monday quarter two, we start on lesson 46. So there’s no downtime.
Leahy: If you have a two-and-a-half-month summer break or sometimes three-month summer break, you go back and you end lesson 45 on the last day of May, and then when you come back mid-August, you got to go back to less than 35 or something like that? You’ve got to go back a bit and recap.
Bradley: You’re just starting over every year and the kids have to get re-acclimated and you spend weeks on relearning routines and procedures and how to be in a classroom again. So you’re kind of starting from scratch.
Leahy: And the other thing that’s fascinating about Thales Academy is this. Here in the Metro Nashville area, if you want to go to a private school, the tuition prices will range from they’ll range all the way up from $25,000 to $30,000 a year for private schools. But your tuition is how much?
Bradley: It will be $5,500 in Franklin next year.
Leahy: (Chuckles) A lot of people listening have just dropped their coffee. (Bradley laughs) $5,500 for a full year of high-quality, affordable education. That’s amazing.
We’ll talk a little bit more about how you accomplish that, but let’s talk about the parents as they look at this. A lot of parents send their kids to public schools because it’s … ‘free.’
Bradley: Right.
Leahy: A lot of your parents make a significant sacrifice to come up with that $5,500. What does that mean when they make that sacrifice?
Bradley: I think you can’t make a more important investment for your family than your child’s education. And honestly, it’s a steal, Mike, because I think most families are paying twice that for preschool. So daycare/preschool for the first four years of their child’s life.
Leahy: Parents listening know that to be true. And the other part of this is when I talked to Bob Luddy – the founder of Thales Academy, a great guy – he said, look, if a family is committed, you can rearrange your budgeting so that you can come up with $5,500 a year. But in addition to that, there are scholarships available.
Bradley: Correct. If you really want to do it, you can.
Listen to the full interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Rachael Bradley” by Thales Academy.
