My Journey: Why I Built What I Wished Had Existed
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I did not start out as a credentialed educator.
I started out as a mother who believed her children deserved more than what the system was offering — and a teacher who showed up anyway, long before anyone handed me a piece of paper that said I was qualified to do so.
For years I taught without a traditional credential. I had a degree from a non-accredited institution, a deep love for children and learning, and more questions than answers. But the need was real, the families were there, and I could not look away. So I taught. In private schools. In my own living room. Around my kitchen table. In a building run by Alaska Homeschool in Delta Junction. Wherever there was a child who needed someone to show up and a parent who needed support, I tried to be there.
All the while, I was homeschooling my own five children.
Those years were my real education. Every struggle my children faced became a lesson I carried into my teaching. Every breakthrough they had taught me something no textbook could have. The hours I spent figuring out how to reach my own kids — how to teach a child who learned differently, how to keep going on the hard days, how to make literature come alive at the kitchen table — those hours built something in me that a classroom degree never could have.
And I was never doing it alone. Alongside my own children, there were always others. Students I tutored. Children whose parents trusted me with their education in co-ops and small classes. Families who needed help and had nowhere else to turn. Teaching them gave my children something too — real relationships, real community, real socialization that grew naturally out of learning together rather than being manufactured by a school schedule.
Over the years there were times I charged for classes and times I did not. Families in different seasons of life needed different things, and I tried to meet them where they were. But the heart behind it was never about the money. Most of it was free. And today, through TruLearn, all of it is. Every class, every resource, every hour I give is donated freely — my time, my talents, my experience. It is a labor of love. It has always been a labor of love.
Eventually I went back to school. I earned my master's degree in elementary education from the University of Alaska Southeast and completed my teaching credential. I want to be honest with you about why — it was not because I felt I had more to learn in a classroom. I went back for the credential. The piece of paper that opens doors that might otherwise stay closed. And I will tell you plainly: I did not learn anything in that program that my years of experience had not already taught me. What college gave me was confirmation. What the ground gave me was wisdom. I did not go back to replace what I had learned. I went back to make it official.
In 2021 I founded TruLearn, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization in Delta Junction, Alaska. At our peak we served 135 students. I still donate my time. I still show up. Because the mission has never been about building a career. It has been about serving families who are doing one of the hardest and most important jobs a parent can do — educating their own children at home.
And then I built Cornerstone Academics.
Because after 25 years of teaching, after homeschooling five children, after working with hundreds of families across every kind of setting — I kept running into the same problem. The curriculum I needed did not exist. The literature packets that matched the classical standard I believed in, written at the right level, with the right structure, for the right reasons — I could not find them.
So I built them.
Not because I had a publishing degree. Not because someone gave me permission. Because I had spent a quarter century in the trenches with homeschool families, and I knew exactly what they needed.
If you are sitting where I once sat — uncertain, unqualified on paper, wondering if you have what it takes to educate your children — I want you to hear this:
The most important things I know, I did not learn in a classroom.
I learned them by showing up, year after year, for children who needed someone to believe in them. By staying when it was hard. By asking better questions. By refusing to stop growing.
You can do this. Not because it will be easy. But because love, commitment, and a willingness to keep learning are more powerful than any credential ever issued.
I am still learning. Every single day.
And I would not have it any other way.