Educational Services of America

Motto Magazine
by Allison Weiss Entrekin

Mark Claypool was never supposed to be the CEO of an $80 million company. He was a social worker, so by definition he was supposed to be poor.

Like so many before him, he was supposed to take his master’s degree in sociology and his belief that he could change the world and enter the next chapter of his life, entitled “Becoming Jaded.” He wasn’t supposed to dig himself up from beneath his blanket of paperwork, he wasn’t supposed to tell his bosses goodbye. And he certainly wasn’t supposed to clear his head and start thinking of solutions – solutions that led to a business with 1,500 employees, 6,000 students and $80 million in annual revenues.

But that’s exactly what Claypool did. “I saw that there was a huge need out there for programs that could address the needs of America’s kids in a new way,” Claypool, 42, says. “I was frustrated with bureaucracy and I felt like resources were being taken away, so I decided to try it on my own.”

So, in 1999, Claypool founded Educational Services of America in Nashville with one employee and a dining-room table that subbed as an office. By the end of his first year in business, he had wooed a few key investors, purchased half a dozen schools with programs he admired and upped his employee count to 150. Today, ESA operates programs in 16 states and is actively seeking opportunities to expand into the rest. It also enjoys a luxury few companies ever experience – little competition. “There’s nobody who is doing anything as comprehensive as what we’re doing,” Claypool says.

What they’re doing is educating America’s most difficult-to-teach kids, from sixth-graders with severe behavioral issues to college students with autism. ESA is divided into four programs: one for autistic kids in kindergarten through 12th grade, one for autistic college students, one for middle- and high-school students with severe behavioral problems and one for kids in kindergarten through 12th grade who have a variety of learning issues.

The company’s business model is fairly complex, taking different forms from state to state and, occasionally, region to region. In some instances, ESA contracts with a public school system to run a program out of its classrooms. In others, ESA creates its own private school. In still others, ESA creates a nonprofit to run a charter school, then manages that nonprofit. “Every situation and every market is different, depending on the area, its needs and its laws,” Claypool says. “We are also paid by a variety of sources – vouchers, families, school districts or a combination of the above.”

Still, despite its many incarnations, ESA has a single company-wide philosophy: All children, no matter how serious their difficulties, can succeed. “We want these kids to become viable human beings in their communities,” says Stephanie Martin, ESA’s vice president of program operations. “We don’t want them to require assistance the rest of their lives.” To accomplish this, the company provides structured educational environments filled with staff members who are trained to be positive, nurturing and firm when necessary. The class sizes are small, the administration supportive, the resources abundant. And no one, regardless of the extreme nature of his or her issues, is turned away.

For people like Sarah Fishman-Boyd, a professor at the University of Houston, finding ESA has been like stumbling upon manna from heaven. Her 20-year-old son, Alex, was diagnosed with a mild form of autism at age 3. “Socially, his problems were pretty profound,” she says. “I had always thought it would be nice for him to go to college, but I didn’t know how it would be possible. I could have put him up in an apartment, but then I would have been the one to grocery shop for him and clean up after him. He really wouldn’t have been independent.”

As she researched Alex’s options, Fishman-Boyd heard about College Living Experience, one of ESA’s programs. CLE helps autistic students learn to live on their own, from ensuring they stay on track at school to teaching them how to pay their water bills. It even offers such social activities as group trips to a pizza joint or a bowling alley. When Fishman-Boyd learned CLE operated a campus in Austin, Texas, she asked Alex if he wanted to try it. “He liked the idea of having his own apartment,” she says. “As much as it scared me, I knew that if he could have his independence, it would mean so much to him.”

Today, Alex is enrolled in Austin Community College, where he takes classes through a vocational program that teaches administrative skills. He navigates the bus system, eats out with friends from CLE and even has a girlfriend. “When my husband and I visit him, he makes us breakfast,” Fishman-Boyd says. “I feel so fortunate that this program exists; he’s just blossoming.”

With recent statistics showing that one in 150 American children has autism, the demand for programs like CLE and its K-12 counterpart, Spectrum Center Schools, has become glaringly obvious – and Claypool isn’t surprised. “We saw the statistics continue to climb, and we knew we needed to be positioned to meet this need in a very creative way,” Claypool says. “We want to be a one-stop solution. That’s what I want to end up with when I fall down dead somewhere. That’s what I want to leave behind.”

Claypool’s passion for difficult-to-teach children stems from his own educational experience. As a teenager in Birmingham, Ala., “I didn’t like school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I had trouble finding the relevance of what most of high school offered,” he says. While he was an undergraduate student at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, he took a class field trip to a mental health institution and became interested in the way the human mind works. After double-majoring in psychology and sociology and then receiving his master’s degree from Middle Tennessee, Claypool entered the field as a child protective services worker in one of Nashville’s suburban counties.

The transition from college papers to drug-use investigations wasn’t easy for Claypool, the son of a minister and a man who kneels down to look children in the eyes when they talk. “During that time, I became aware of things that happened to kids I never imagined could happen,” he says. “As a preacher’s kid, to see children who have been beaten and raped and to realize they were just being dumped into the public-school system with all that baggage, it really affected me. The experience shaped my philosophy about life and what I wanted to do more than anything else.”

After struggling beneath inefficient operating systems and inordinate amounts of paperwork and after seeing kids without support systems lose hope, Claypool came to a conclusion: “There isn’t enough money in the world to solve these kids’ social problems, to keep parents from beating their kids, to keep people from using drugs,” he says in his usual even tone. “But one thing I knew we could do was get kids into an educational program that would give them the opportunity to rise above. … I’m a big believer in leverage, and I think education is the place where you can get the most traction for improving their lives.”

Claypool decided to leave his job and move to the private sector, where he helped found a school in Nashville that specialized in keeping juvenile delinquents out of jail and on the path toward a high-school diploma. The concept took off, and soon Claypool was charged with replicating it across the eastern part of the country. But after a decade of planting schools, he started to feel the familiar frustration of being saddled by bureaucracy and inadequate resources. He knew his mission was to offer an education to kids on the margins, but he also knew it was time to do it his way. And thus, Educational Services of America was born.

Coming from the for-profit world, the idea of starting a proprietary educational company didn’t strike Claypool as odd. Still, “I thought long and hard about it,” he says. “It certainly would have been more traditional to be a nonprofit, but I would have spent my day every day asking for money. I didn’t want to be strapped for resources, and I wanted to easily be able to obtain capital.”

Claypool found a group of investors who shared his vision, then began to seek out quality schools he could purchase, infuse with ESA’s philosophies and replicate. But despite his company’s rapid growth, he still learned a few lessons the hard way. “I was terribly naive about some of the aspects of starting a business – cash flow, what happens when you don’t get paid on time,” he says. “When you have to get a second mortgage on your house to make payroll a few times, it sobers you.” But Claypool, armed with the support of his attorney wife, Cindy, and their young daughter, Grace, never lost his faith in the validity of ESA’s mission. “I knew the need was there, and I knew we could dominate this quasi-industry,” he says. “There’s just such a vacuum, it was a situation just waiting for someone to fill the hole.”

Fill it he did, and as new statistics and trends cause the hole to morph, his company is ready to fill in the gaps. As of this writing, ESA is in negotiations with public schools across the country for 50 additional contracts, plans to open 20 additional CLE campuses within two years and expects to see at least $100 million in annual revenues this year (at this point, most excess cash flow is put into development and internal improvements, though Claypool expects that to change by next year). Asked about the prospect of turning ESA into a publicly held company, Claypool gives a sly smile. “That thought has occurred to us,” he says. “We’ll see how it goes.”

In the meantime, Claypool will keep doing what he’s good at: finding creative solutions for common problems, educating America’s unreached kids and making a profit along the way. As it turns out, Claypool was supposed to be a social worker and a CEO; in doing both, he has found success.