The Boy Who Bought His School
From the 1950’s to the 1990’s, HM Perry School served elementary children from Davenport, a river town on the Mississippi in Iowa. In the 1970’s, one particular student was traversing its hallways learning all the basics. Miss Ellis would teach him to read, Mr. Christman demonstrated the basics of square dance and a proper pull up and Mr. Sharp explained the mysteries of the Solar System as well as some basic chemistry.
Of course, learning was done with chalkboards, books (with real paper pages) and of course, the inimitable #2 pencil. It was good. It was a different time.
Changes in demographics ultimately caused the school to close and transfer the remaining students to other buildings — but as they say, when one door closes, another opens. On a September day, 25 years later, that boy took his son and the YMCA flag football team to the school’s grassy field to practice. It was then he noticed a small piece of paper: SEALED BIDS DUE OCTOBER 20TH.
As a business owner, he was immediately intrigued. His current location, a small 3,500 square foot space next to the day-old bread store and across from the cemetary had quickly grown too small. But a school with 26,000 square feet was a different level altogether.
Memories of the playground, favorite teachers and at least one cute girl, drove him to investigate the offering. If nothing else, he could play a key role protecting the building over time.
And, this was Iowa. Land was cheap. But how much to bid for a 26,000 square foot building, 50 years old with six acres at the intersection of an Interstate and state highway. This was tricky. Sealed bids don’t provide an opportunity for second chances. At the end of the day, the decision was made to bid $101,000 in case someone came in at the obvious $100,000.
When the bids were opened there were three numbers to review, but $101,00 was the highest. But the school district was disappointed. They had expected the bids to be higher. They reached out and made the announcement that the bid was his, but he would have to sweeten the pot. After a consultation, $5,000 more was thrown in and the former HM Perry pupil now owned his boyhood school.
As he first walked through the building, he could still see his teachers exactly where they were when he walked out of the school in 1976. But there was one room he had never been in, the teacher’s lounge. While less impressive than what was imagined, it was this room that would become his office.
With it’s private bathroom and position in the middle of the elementary classrooms, it was perfect for an entrepreneur preparing to scale a company.
Then there was the gym. Some suggested it should become a warehouse but to the new owner, it’s use was obvious — weekly pickup basketball games with friends and employees. But first the hoops would need to be raised to 10’ from their elementary height of 9’.
This story might be entertaining in it’s own right but it doesn’t end there.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, and as a new writer for Medium, it seemed a good way to introduce myself. And sometimes, all you need is a great building and plenty of opportunities to grow to get a business off the ground.
Prior to entrepreneurship, I served a six year span in the Iowa Legislature, which included four years as Chairman of the House Education Committee. My favorite piece of legislation was a technology school fund that allowed districts to buy computers, connect their buildings to the Internet or use it for other transformational technologies. That was the impetus for many schools taking the leap into a connected, computerized education system.
So, it’s probably not a surprise that my focus inside this new building eventually turned to transforming education through technology. A lot of focus toward societal problem solving lands at the door of government. But through the process of politics, it became clear that the private sector has a very important role to play as well.
In 2016, I put on my first virtual reality headset and knew that this technology would ultimately change the way the world learns. Many early developers were focused completely on gaming, and expectations were high that gaming in VR would quickly transform the marketplace. For games like Beat Saber and Arizona Sunshine, the effort paid off.
I had a different idea. Thinking back to my time in the legislature as we sat for hours and days trying to determine how to motivate students to love learning, I began to consider how VR could foster a love of science.
Within a few weeks, I had conferred with a few experts in the industry and developed a plan to create education content in virtual reality. That’s how the company, VictoryVR was born.
The former school library was now a large conference room and coffee shop. It was here the strategy sessions would play out. The gym was now, well a gym, but also a place to shoot scenes and pace as we plotted our ascendance in this nascent field. The upper grade math room became the place the engineer’s and developer’s would code the product. And the principal’s office — that place with both good and bad memories — is where the operating manager would sit and execute the marketing and sales plan. As for me, I remained firmly in the teacher’s lounge, when I wasn’t on the road talking with educators or investors.
The plan called for supplemental science curriculum for both middle school and high school students. Rene Gadelha, the curriculum specialist, created a plan to align everything in the virtual reality world with the newly defined Next Gen Science Standards. This gave teachers the ability to sync VR experiences against their lesson plans.
Next, there was a need for on-air talent. That’s when Wendy the Science Teacher came to be. Wendy had been a finalist on ABC Television’s national Top Teacher search. She was a natural in front of the camera and enthusiastic about new technologies.
With the team assembled, the final piece of the puzzle was creating a green screen studio in the 1st grade classroom. By the middle of 2018, all 48 units of supplemental virtual reality curriculum had been completed. One publication listed VictoryVR’s content among the top seven education VR apps in the world, alongside the BBC and Discovery.
In 2019, the company and it’s virtual experiences received a higher level of recognition as Microsoft licensed a big portion of the library and HTC Vive gave the virtual frog dissection its highest award for VR education.
Even more, Intel and Qualcomm brought the company into its mentorship program.
People often ask me if I ever dreamed of owning the school when I was young. The short answer is no. No child ever expects their school to go out of business eventually. But reflecting on the experience of going to work at my elementary school is usually a great feeling, sprinkled with moments that are just a touch melancholy. It’s hard not to stop sometimes and replay a scene in your head that happened forty years ago. From the time Mark Dyles announced to my entire class that my underwear was on backwards to the time Gary Lummer lost his finger when his ring got stuck on a ladder in the gym. Those were golden years, almost like watching ‘A Christmas Story’ and the memories are more sweet than anything else.
At the end of the day, we all know a school is not a building, but rather the students, teachers and curriculum that come together in their individual parts to make up the whole. Today, the Victory Center no longer acts as a school building for almost 300 students, but rather, an incubator for the creation of cutting edge content that will transform learning around the world.
And as for me? I went from a boy who carelessly moved through the halls of HM Perry School to an entrepreneur who gets to spread his love of learning to students in countries everywhere.
Steve Grubbs is the founder of VictoryXR as well as several other companies related to eCommerce and technology. He is the son of a school teacher and the former chair of the House Education Committee in the Iowa Legislature.
Copyright Steve Grubbs 2019
