Welcome to the Tudor Dixon podcast. I am excited today because we have

Erica Donald here with us to talk about education and just so you know Erica is a

guest faculty member for the Leadership Institute's school board leaders programs as well as the CEO of Optima Ed, an education experienced company dedicated to expanding high quality school choice and she also happens to be married

to someone that we've had on this podcast before whose name is

Congressman Byron Donald's and together they have three boys which means education is not only

her professional passion but also her personal passion because as a mom of four girls

I know what it's like to want to make sure that your kids are

getting the best possible education so Erica welcome to the podcast thank you so

much for having me I'm excited to be here absolutely and so you can tell us how to make sure that our kids are

getting the best education because you have a lot of really interesting things

going on I mean there's so much to touch on I think that it's interesting to me because after COVID a lot of us opened our eyes to the fact that

education might not be exactly what we thought and there's a lot of alternative forms of

education that people might not know about.

So if you can kind of like dig into that and tell us what you're working on.

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, 12 years ago is where my education journey began.

I was in investment management for 20 years,

had no thought to education except buying a house

in the neighborhood where I wanted my kids to go to school,

like a lot of middle-class families do.

But I learned pretty quickly that when you have four girls or

three boys not every one of them is going to learn the same. And so I

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