BusinessTN

This year, for the second year in a row, Nashville-based Educational Services of America ranks among Tennessee's 100 fast-growing, emerging, "hot" companies to watch as chosen by this magazine. Founded in 1999 and led by president and CEO Mark Claypool, a former social worker, ESA offers programs aimed at educating America's most difficult-to-teach kids—children with special needs such as autism, behavioral problems, or who are otherwise at risk of dropping out.

According to Claypool, a student drops out of an American public school every nine seconds. The cost? Beyond the personal tragedy, the U.S. Department of Education estimates that in 2005 alone dropouts cost the economy $260 billion in lost wages, taxes and productivity.

ESA's successful track record and well-regarded reputation is reflected by its lengthy client list, which extends to districts in 17 states, including Illinois, Florida and Texas. But interestingly, until this year, the company had never done any work in Tennessee, or more specifically, in its own backyard of Nashville, where the company is headquartered and the CEO lives. This was the case despite the fact that Nashville-Davidson County schools boast a mere 70% graduation rate.

Why wasn't ESA able to get an audience with the Metro schools administration for the longest time? Whether the answer is reluctance to try new approaches or a hide-bound devotion to bureaucracy matters little now because, thankfully, that period of disinterest has passed. Earlier this year, ESA finally got in the doors of local schools, a development attributable in part to the state of Tennessee's assumption of administrative control of the failing district and, arguably, in part to the presence of newly elected Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, who through his campaign and governing emphasis on reducing the drop-out rate ushered in a spirit of greater openness to innovative solutions to school problems. With the support of the local school board, an ESA division (one acquired in 2005) now runs an aggressive and proven off-campus "ombudsmen" program within Nashville schools that deals with kids at risk of dropping out.

ESA's programs have a proven success rate with kids. But even better, the company can demonstrate that on a cost-per-pupil basis its programs are cheaper to run than those the traditional schools currently employ using their own resources. The proof is in the pudding. ESA wouldn't be a profitable business—Claypool pins annual revenues at his 1,500 employee company at almost $100 million—if that weren't the case.

ESA's programs also work because they get little or no push back from the teachers' union, traditionally an obstacle to school reform. Since ESA's programs remove the hardest cases from the classroom, unions seldom oppose the practical work being accomplished.

Now that the door has swung open in Nashville, ESA, bolstered by the support of the state department of education, was at press time negotiating with a handful of other school districts across the state regarding the use of ESA programs and services. Not only does that development provide needed support for a homegrown business; it also expands the use of private sector solutions to educational challenges in Tennessee. That's a good thing.

Drew Ruble,
Editor

Corrections In our September/October story, "Hippocratic Dearth," Mary Ann Watson should have been identified as the Assistant Dean of Graduate Medical Education for the University of Tennessee, Health Sciences Center, (UTHSC) in Memphis. UTHSC is the principal entity for all of the University of Tennessee, College of Medicine campuses, including Knoxville.