About Us
Ray Girn
Ray Girn has spent the past two decades on the frontier of educational innovation.
Ray grew up in and around Toronto, Canada. While earning an Honors B.Sc. in philosophy and psychology from the University of Toronto, he launched an SAT tutoring and test prep service. In 2003, he joined a nascent family business, LePort Schools, as a curriculum developer. A year later, he moved to Southern California to co-found LePort’s elementary school, where he worked as a teacher & program designer, and later as head of school. There, he first pioneered the fusion of high-agency pedagogy with deep-knowledge curricula which would come to define his career. Over time, Ray took on greater scope at LePort, becoming the company’s Strategic Director in 2008, then CEO in 2010. As CEO he guided the organization’s transformation into what became North America’s largest Montessori network.
In 2016, Ray left LePort Schools to found Higher Ground Education, serving as its CEO for nearly a decade. In addition to launching Guidepost Montessori and building it into the world’s largest Montessori network, far surpassing what he had accomplished at LePort Schools, Ray architected innovative models (micro school, homeschools, virtual programs, and a teacher-training center) that expressed his unique vision for what’s possible in education. Always at the core was Ray’s focus on the unity of will and knowledge, agency and science, pedagogy and curriculum.
Along the way, Ray’s conviction around the importance of progress studies led him to become a founding board member of Roots of Progress, an organization he believes in deeply. After some years of growing differences with Higher Ground Education’s board and lead investors, in 2025, Ray left the organization to pursue his missionary work on his own terms once again.
Rebecca Girn
Rebecca Girn has been around Montessori schools her whole life.
As a young child and adolescent, she watched her single mother start a school in a rented church basement and gradually build it into one of New Jersey’s top elementary and middle school programs. She experienced Montessori education, not only as a student, but through the lived entrepreneurialism of seeing and participating in a school created, whole cloth, out of nothing. She worked for the family business from age 12, as well as attending the school through middle school.
Rebecca went on to major in Classics at the University of Chicago. There, she developed her interest in the “Great Books” program, as well as in works of antiquity, and studied abroad in Athens, directly examining Greek ruins and artifacts. While at university, Rebecca also found time to work as an assistant teacher at a Hyde Park neighborhood Montessori school and to tutor students in the Chicago public school system.
Rebecca then moved to Southern California, where she earned her J.D. at UCLA and launched her legal career with the firm of Dorsey and Whitney. In due course, she felt the entrepreneurial itch herself, and traded firm life for a startup role. She joined Ray at LePort Schools in 2010, while it was just starting to build momentum, and quickly came to lead legal strategy as well as talent and program design. In 2016, Rebecca co-founded Higher Ground Education as its Chief Programs Officer and General Counsel. Over nearly a decade, she defined the program vision for Guidepost Montessori, went through many iterations of classroom design to perfect Guidepost’s prepared environments, crafted curricula, and developed the training model for the innovative Prepared Montessorian Institute teacher and school leadership training programs.
Throughout her time at Guidepost, Rebecca continually traveled the country, observing classrooms and coaching teachers and school leaders to level up their programs. In 2025, tired of constant friction with investors who did not see or appreciate the founding vision of Higher Ground Education, or what she considered the true value of the company’s educational impact and innovative program assets, she resigned from Higher Ground Education. Now, she is proud to co-found Fulcrum School.
Throughout their journey, Ray and Rebecca have tried to live by the principles they champion for children:
To be assertive in pursuit of what you love. To be morally ambitious in tackling hard challenges. To rely on your integrity when confronted with threats or seduced by invitations to compromise. To be magnanimous towards critics and haters. And to live a life focused always on building the values they wish to see in the world.
Today, they model those ideals every day, at home with their three sons in Austin, Texas. They are practiced with the hardships, obstacles, idealism, and creativity involved with doing great work. They will bring to bear all of their considerable experience, together with a maniacal focus on details, to every minute of every day at Fulcrum School.
Want to hear more about their “all-in” partnership as married founders over the years? Listen to their conversation on The Founder’s Mindset podcast episode Wanting It All, or Nothing at All: A Case for Being ‘Married to Your Work’.