Brave competitors

Vernon Johnson is a Board Member at Swing Education, President & CEO at ACCELERATE LEARNING INC., and Non Executive Board Member at Cognita Schools and is based in Plano, Texas. He has worked as President:Voyager Business at CAMBIUM LEARNING GROUP, INC.; CEO at The Virtual Network; and Board Member at New England College of Business. Vernon attended Ball State University between 1971 and 1973, Ball State University between 1966 and 1970, and Indiana University Bloomington between 1983 and 1985.

Ray Girn received a BSc with honors from the University of Toronto, with a focus on philosophy and neuropsychology, as well an Association Montessori Internationale teaching diploma from the Montessori Institute of San Diego. Prior to founding Higher Ground, Girn had a 13-year career with LePort Schools. Working at LePort’s K-8 lab school, he helped lead a team of educators in architecting LePort’s upper school curriculum and program. In 2010, he took over as CEO, expanded the team, and implemented an ambitious growth strategy. In five years, Girn and his team took the company from a small, local family business of three schools to the largest Montessori operator in the United States. In March 2016, Girn founded Higher Ground Education with the vision of greatly accelerating the growth of Montessori education globally. Higher Ground aims to create a comprehensive international platform to deliver high-quality, high-fidelity Montessori programming everywhere, as well as to conduct the research and development necessary to extend Montessori principles to new, innovative models of secondary education.