#StartupsEverywhere profile: Jared Scherz, Founder & CEO, TeacherCoach
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Edtech to Bridge the Personal, Professional Wellness Gap of Educators
TeacherCoach is an education technology company that is dedicated to providing accessible personal and professional development tools to educators and parents in school districts across the U.S. Based in Mount Laurel, N.J., Jared Scherz—Founder and CEO—told us about what led him to found TeacherCoach, the challenges he’s faced in building a social enterprise startup, and how he’s navigating the complexities of content moderation given their platform’s unique audience.
Tell us about your background. What led you to TeacherCoach?
I am a clinical psychologist, and in the early part of my career I was an elementary school guidance counselor. The combination of those two jobs made me well aware of the great need for mental health wellness and other related services in under-resourced communities. I decided I could scale what was ordinarily a singular kind of endeavor—seeking therapy. And with TeacherCoach, I decided to do that through the school district, seeking to make them a hub of wellness in their community.
What is the work you all are doing at TeacherCoach? How does your platform work?
We recruit content experts from all different fields related to personal growth and professional development in education. This can include nutrition, mental health, among other things related to an educator’s work performance.
Then we create video-based tutorial courses, which we call engagements, that we offer to school districts. And if they would like, also help bring in sponsorship or funding. To accomplish that, we connect with local, regional, and national businesses that want the branding, exposure, or goodwill. We ask those businesses to sponsor making our platform and resources available to the district. Ultimately, the school district will get all kinds of mental health, wellness, and professional support for both the faculty and the families in their community without having to pay for it.
Every school district gets their own dedicated portal that’s branded, secure, and private. And through that platform, they can choose to have a combination of live and on demand support, ranging from the pre-recorded engagements, monthly webinars by our staff, weekly emails, or other on demand trainings. We try to create a number of different modalities to provide targeted support for both the faculty and the families.
COVID has heavily impacted the US education system, and we’ve seen how educators, administrators, students and parents have had to reinvent learning virtually. How has the pandemic affected TeacherCoach’s work?
Early on in our work, prior to the pandemic, school districts recognized the need to support their educators, but didn't have the funding to prioritize that kind of work. And that was a bit of a challenge. With the pandemic, I think there's been a greater recognition of need and demand for the kind of health and wellness resources that we provide. However, this is still a challenge because administrations are inundated with very basic needs of safety in educational environments right now. So even now, mental health is not as prioritized as it needs to be. And I'm afraid that with the increasing rates of anxiety and depression, it's going to create a bit of a crisis. But I'm hopeful that more and more districts and educational communities will recognize the importance of being proactive in addressing these concerns.
For TeacherCoach as a business, the pandemic has been challenging in that we can't get in front of educators or decision-makers to sit down and have a more personal kind of conversation about how we can be a resource for them. Nevertheless, because our platform is virtual, we utilize remote technologies for webinars and workshops which enables us to easily provide support for educators who are working from home.
One of the components of your platform is the ability for school districts and educators to develop their own personal and professional development courses to sell on TeacherCoach. I also understand that there is a social media component for educators to share information and ideas. How do you handle making sure those creating their own content are using your platform appropriately?
As a psychologist, I'm perpetually aware of the need for people to be empowered and for systems to have sustainable solutions. I don't want people becoming reliant or dependent on me or on only the materials we provide on the platform because that defeats the purpose. Our software—we call it a learning engagement system (LES)—allows for the district or community to create their own trainings in addition to utilizing our vast library.
That's appealing to entities because if they're coming in as a county or as a region, and they want to be able to share their own resources, then they're better equipped to do that. Now they have created their own ecosystem: we provide the tool, some of the funding, and ancillary support that they may not have expertise in, but ultimately they're becoming more self-reliant.
In terms of the content that is shared in the portals, the school districts are likely to have a higher level of integrity, perhaps compared to some other commercial platform that is less sensitive to exactly what is posted or shared. Luckily, the teachers and administrators have been very thoughtful about things like copyright infringement, but it doesn't mean they may not accidentally violate those kinds of rules.
Everything our team creates is generated by our own motion graphics and animation artists. We're very cautious to avoid using other people's videos or material. We might embed resources such as another website, but if we do we make it very clear we are linking to someone else's website and material. We try to use those resources sparingly, though, which is unfortunate because there's so much good information out there and we would love to be able to tap into it. But we also don't want to create content problems for ourselves. It's all very complicated.
As a newer, infant company, we haven't had to tackle scaling up content moderation systems because people aren't generating much of their own content yet, but it will become an important issue. We will need to put more safety measures in place, including tools to educate users, because if someone uploads a YouTube video to the platform, and they're not paying attention to whether or not that was acceptable or they're trying to generate revenue from it, then it will become an issue we have to manage. This is on our radar and it is something that we're going to have to dedicate resources to within the next year or so. But at this point I am looking at it as a good problem because it means we're growing and scaling up.
Are there any local, state, or federal startup issues that you think should receive more attention from policymakers?
There's a debate around delivering mental health virtually. Under current law, we've had this freedom to conduct psycho-education and therapy sessions remotely and, thankfully, insurance companies have been willing to reimburse it. This creates greater flexibility to reach people in wider, different areas, including those who are not comfortable or able to meet in person.
But we don't have a lot of legal guidance on how we should be protecting peoples’ private information. We also do not have a good sense of where education, particularly in the mental health space, falls on the spectrum of sensitive information. And as a result, we haven't gotten into doing as much work with children because we're afraid of the unknowns around the privacy requirements. I think that's unfortunate because kids could really benefit from more remote services, including those we offer.
Regarding running the business more generally, I wish there was an easier way to get government assistance with the kinds of work we're doing. It has been difficult as a more social-enterprise startup. We didn't want to go to traditional investors because we didn't want to be beholden to making decisions based solely on the bottom line. We're a for-profit company, but we're also more mission driven, and we want to focus on what's in the best interest of the people that we're serving. As a result, I think we have a little bit of a harder time figuring out what resources are available to us.
What are your goals for TeacherCoach moving forward?
I would very much like to be the first line of defense for school districts and educational associations around the country. And I would like to bring more focus to combining personal and professional growth so that educators and families are better supported, especially in under-resourced areas. I want school districts to better appreciate how they can implement equity, not just talk about it.
Having a system in which businesses actually support education, rather than just selling to and profiting off of schools, is something that we have the opportunity to facilitate. We'll take a lot of the strain off the state and national funding that school districts rely on with the private funding that we can help provide. Our team and platform are going to be at the forefront of both those areas.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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