Join host Priscilla Rahn as she discusses the launch of Excalibur Classical Academy, a school dedicated to reviving classical principles in education. In this episode, Scott Anderson, co-founder of the academy, shares his journey from aerospace engineering to education and his vision for fostering integrity and excellence in American youth. Discover how classical education, rooted in values of wisdom and virtue, can reshape the future of America’s educational landscape.
Welcome to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Rahn. She’s a master educator and author leading the conversation to restore the American mind through wisdom, virtue, and truth.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Restoring Education in America. I’m your host, Priscilla Rahn, and I’m so thrilled that you decided to join the conversation today. So many people across America are doing something amazing to celebrate America’s 250th birthday. Well, there’s a new school that’s opening this fall in 2026, America’s 250th. It is called Excalibur Classical Academy. And they are opening in the Centennial area. So if you have a young child that’s starting school, kindergarten through third grade, please go to their website, ExcaliburClassicalAcademy.org. They are now doing tours and open houses for parents. Enrollment is open, so they would love to meet you. And also, if you are a teacher and you are interested in teaching at a classical school, please go to their website to submit your resume. Excalibur Classical Academy is a private school and their mission and vision is restoring America’s heritage by developing servant leaders who are keepers and defenders of the principles of freedom for which our founding fathers pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. And it is such a special school that my next guest is going to come and talk all about Excalibur Classical Academy. I’m welcoming him to the stage right now. Hello, Scott Anderson, the founder of Excalibur Classical Academy. How’s it going?
SPEAKER 03 :
Very good. Thank you, Priscilla. I’m not the only founder. I also have my wife, Valerie, and she is co-founder.
SPEAKER 01 :
You guys are amazing, and I want to share all of the things that you are envisioning for this school. But before we get into the conversation, I’m going to share a little bit of your bio with the listeners. Scott Anderson is an aerospace entrepreneur, education leader, and founder of Excalibur Classical Academy, a private classical school dedicated to restoring excellence in American education. He’s best known as the co-founder and longtime president of Seeker Engineering, a Colorado-based aerospace company that designed and built high reliability electronics for space missions, working closely with NASA and the U.S. space community. Under his leadership, Seeker became a trusted provider of advanced spacecraft data systems and was ultimately acquired in 2021 by Raytheon Technologies. After decades of success in the aerospace industry, Scott turned his attention to education. As the co-founder of Excalibur Classical Academy, he is committed to reviving a classical model of education grounded in truth, virtue, and academic rigor. His work reflects the belief that strong institutions, whether in engineering or education, are built on timeless principles, disciplined thinking, and moral clarity. But Scott, your most important job is husband to Valerie, dad to your three daughters, and grandpa to your five grandchildren. Six grandchildren. Six grandchildren. Wait, you just had one, right?
SPEAKER 03 :
I have a step-grandson who’s 25.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, I see. Okay. But don’t you have another one on the way? We do. Oh, okay. So you’re going to be a little bit busy. One of the questions I love to ask grandparents is what is your grandpa name? It’s Guga. Guga. Okay. I haven’t heard that one. So you get the ding, ding, ding, ding. You get the prize for the most original grandpa name. okay so for again for people who don’t know you you’re quite active as well you have a ranch you love to ski you love to cycle and you fly airplanes the key word there is love very passionate about anything on the outdoors always have been grew up in boy scouts eagle scout with my brother uh
SPEAKER 03 :
Eric. I have two brothers. And yeah, we enjoy the outdoors very much.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I think you’re going to be a centurion by how active and healthy you are. I believe you’re going to live a long, long life. But let’s talk about this exciting venture that you are now on. You’ve built a successful business in aerospace. You just sold it and you thought you were going to ride off into the sunset, didn’t you? You thought you were going to relax. And then you got this crazy idea that you were going to start a school. So take us back to where did this idea come from to start a school?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, it came from the fact that I had three beautiful, lovely daughters. I was watching what I saw in the struggles that America has been having in the last 20 years. And I’ve worried about what that might bring for my grandchildren. And so I started thinking about how can I help? I’m a very strong patriot. I love our country. I want to see our country get back to our founding principles. I want to see our country be very helpful in getting our kids properly educated. If you look at what has occurred in the over the last 20 years when the internet came forward, the children in our society are struggling. COVID certainly contributed greatly to that, but tremendous exposure of information and bad characters who are out there to take advantage of our children really scares a grandfather. And so I started thinking about what can we do? How could I help? I’m just a small cog in this big wheel known as our nation. And so I thought, well, maybe if I started a school, it would appeal to not just my children, but to other children as well. And we could probably try to get back to what our schools, our public schools used to be 50, 60 years ago.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, I think you’re right in the sweet spot. We’re seeing a lot of parents making different choices and engaging in the school choice movement, whether it be putting their children in charter schools. A lot of parents are taking the dive and doing homeschooling, which is really courageous. And you’re kind of right in the middle between homeschool option and charter school option. You’re opening a private school. that is going to help parents have another great option. So you’ve looked at a lot of different models in classical education and you landed on this Lyceum with John Adams Academy. What was it about John Adams that really appealed to you?
SPEAKER 03 :
Patrism, first and foremost. John Adams Academy, Dr. Dean Foreman, his schools that he has put together in California and he’s taking nationally now, really strive for getting back to the core principles and the core elements that our founding fathers, what was it that our founding fathers learned were taught that allowed them to be such incredible people and to create our Constitution. They all didn’t get along. As a matter of fact, some of them very much hated each other, kind of like today. But they found a way to compromise and they found a way to stitch together a republic. And we’ve kind of lost that ability to work with people of differing opinions and views in the world. And I think we need to get back to that. John Adams mentioned that our Constitution was made only for moral and religious people. I think we have to teach our children that if we’re going to have this great republic, we have to approach it from a moralistic and a Christian way.
SPEAKER 01 :
You know you just sent me an article that talked about classical education and its connection to the Christian faith. And there are many many different models of classical education but the article was making an argument for making sure that we keep that Christianity as part of the classical education. And you mentioned our forefathers as they were creating our documents. And when we read it, it talks all about our inalienable rights. Well, where do those rights come from? They come from our creator. That’s what it says in our founding documents. Well, who’s our creator? Well, it’s God. And we talk a lot about providence. Well, that’s God. And that’s what separates our nation from other nations. countries and how they establish their foundation and their laws. So when you look at some of the values, what are some values that are important to you personally, Scott, that you would love to see in the next generation, especially as someone who built a company, when you were hiring people, you were looking for specific values and character traits in your employees. So what are you looking to build and develop in young people?
SPEAKER 03 :
First and foremost, integrity. Love of country, love of God, and intelligence that has been tempered by the truths that have come to us through our classical, through the millennia. And we really need to provide that. And so if I come back to it, it would be integrity and virtue.
SPEAKER 01 :
That’s beautiful. If you’re just tuning in, my special guest today is Scott Anderson. He is an aerospace engineer and founder of Seeker. And he is now currently the co-founder of Excalibur Classical Academy that’s opening this fall in Centennial. So when we look at the 10 core values, I’m going to go ahead and list them because they’re really amazing. And we want parents who are listening in to know what these 10 core values are. Number one, appreciation of our national heritage. Number two, public and private virtue. Number three, emphasis on mentors and classics. number four scholar empowered learning number five fostering creativity and entrepreneurial spirit number six high standards of academic excellence number seven modeling what we teach number eight abundance mentality number nine building a culture of greatness and number ten self-governance personal responsibility and accountability Now, I know my favorite one of the 10 is I know it’s hard to pick a favorite one. I’m going to say my favorite one is abundance mentality. And it’s one of the virtues that I see in you because you have taken your knowledge, your experience and your wealth. And you’ve said, I want to invest it into the next generation because I want to leave America better than the way I got it. Right. Do you have a favorite one of these? I know I put you on the spot, but… That’s quite all right.
SPEAKER 03 :
The same one as you, abundance mentality. That is my favorite one of our 10 core values. And why is that? It is the optimism. When you have… and optimistic attitude in life, everything is abundance. If you get a setback, well, guess what? It’s only because you weren’t going through the right door. You’re trying to get through the wrong door. You take a step back or you get pushed back or you get thrown back. Well, get up. My brother Eric and I have a friend and he says, you’ve got 24 hours to feel sorry for yourself when something goes bad and then get up and get going. And so to me, abundance mentality is abundance. That aspect which allows people to be very, very positive, even when you have setbacks, it’s never a zero-sum game. It’s always, let’s create something. If it’s not there, let’s go create it and help. And by society, by everybody building something and everything changing, That goes forward that God gave each individual capabilities and talents, use those talents to build things. That’s abundance mentality. And I think that’s a core value that is very important of those 10.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I’m excited for our new students to start engaging in these 10 core values and learning how to be amazing, virtuous young adults. So part of your vision is to make Excalibur Classical Academy accessible to any child who wants to come and get a strong classical education. You, like me, believe that for every problem, there’s a solution. And we have been working really hard to find scholarships and grant to help our parents to be able to attain a great quality education. President Trump passed his big, beautiful bill and his tax credit, and that tax credit goes into effect in 2027. where an individual can donate $1,700 to an SGO like ACE Scholarships, and then they’ll get a $1,700 tax credit by the federal government, which makes it a wash. It’s a win-win. It’s by generosity of heart. And really, the government doesn’t have a whole lot to do other than make sure that it gets to students. Well, fortunately, our governor has opted in. He’s the first and I think only Democrat governor in the United States who has opted in. And we are so grateful for that. But can you believe there are Democrat legislators who want to destroy and block our students from getting that scholarship? So I’m going to talk about House Bill 26-1292. It’s been sponsored by Representative Goldstein, Senator Kipp, and Senator Marchman, all three of who’ve been endorsed by the Teachers Union. So I’m not surprised that Teacher Union endorsed legislators are against free scholarship money for students to access an education. So I’m going to read the bill summary so our listeners know exactly what’s going on. It says, if the state voluntarily elects to participate in a federal program that provides a tax credit for a qualified contribution to a scholarship granting organization, the bill requires the state to include all eligible scholarship granting organizations on its list, identifying scholarship granting organizations to the federal government. Don’t have a problem with that. That just says we’re going to be on a list of scholarship granting organizations. Here’s the problem. If a school enrolls a student whose education related expenses are paid in whole or in part by a scholarship granting organization, the bill requires the school to comply with nondiscrimination requirements and laws concerning students with disabilities. If the school that is subject to these requirements violates a requirement, the school is subject to an injunction and may have its eligibility to receive money for a student whose educated related expenses are paid by a scholarship granting organization suspended. But that’s just the summary. If you read the actual bill, which I did, it’s more than just about a student with a disability. It goes into the things that we don’t believe in, like boys playing in girls sports or sleeping overnight with mixed genders or going into mixed gender bathrooms. Like this is the stuff that they are saying a school like ours, a private school would not have access to a scholarships for our students. So I’m just curious, as someone who’s a founder of a private school who has a very, very clear vision, what is your message to these legislators and to parents?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, first off to the parents, we live in a wonderful country and we have the right to vote. So get out there and vote if you don’t like this type of a law being circulated and drafted, and hopefully it does not get to the governor’s desk. It is a bill that is certainly not part of that abundance mentality of all schools being welcome and encouraged in Colorado. I have no problem with people going to public education, public schools. I also don’t have problems with people homeschooling. I don’t have problems with people going to charter schools. I don’t have problems with people going to private and Christian private schools. Why people have to be nasty to some portion of the school choice movement, I don’t really understand that. So I would encourage people who are voting to pay attention. Let’s see if we can encourage these legislators to change their opinion.
SPEAKER 01 :
That is a beautiful way of explaining it. It’s called freedom. And there is no proper role of the government in education. It’s not in our Constitution. It was originally never supposed to be the role of the government. to educate children. But now here we are, and they’re just going haywire down at the Capitol, trying to block every opportunity for parents to choose where they want to go to school. And you’re 100% right. I think if a parent wants to send their child to a public school, they should have a right to do that. But it does feel discriminatory against a certain population who want to have a specialized educational opportunity and environment for their children, because those are our individual rights. And so, yes, I would encourage teachers and parents who are like-minded to pay attention to when this bill is going to be heard in the education committee and go and testify. But it would be good to go ahead and reach out to these legislators. These are the people that are on the education committee right now. Representative Megan Lukens, Representative Mary Bradfield, Lindsay Gilchrist, Dusty Johnson, Tammy Story, Matthew Martinez, Ava Flavno, Eliza Hamrick, Jackie Phillips, Jennifer Bacon, Lori Garcia-Sander, Anthony Hartsook, and Katie Stewart. These are the members on our state list. education committee who need to hear from us so that you’re right. It doesn’t go past committee. And if it does get to the floor, you know, we’ll need to speak out and say, these are not the type of laws that we want in Colorado. They’re really absolutely too extreme. So you helped Scott get Seeker Engineering a national prominence award. and later sold to Raytheon Technologies. So what lessons from building a high-performance engineering company have you applied to building a school?
SPEAKER 03 :
There’s a lot of similarity in how I started Seeker Engineering and what we’re doing now in starting this school. And it starts with determination. And there’s a lot of hard work, and you just got to keep at it. That’s the big thing between the two. There’s a sacrifice. You have to make sacrifices to get a school like this going. I’m very hopeful that we’ll be able to draw upon the education freedom tax credit to help our students reduce their tuition to come to our school. And that’s a battle for the future. But getting this thing going has been an interesting adventure. It started two or three years ago. Multiple hurdles over the last few years as we’ve been slowly getting there. Finally found a building. That building wasn’t quite right. We walked away from it, looked at a few other buildings. I was getting kind of frustrated because I couldn’t quite find the right building for the school. And so I said, nuts, I’ll take another path. Let’s try something else. And lo and behold, I went out and I had hired a headhunter and helped me find a headmaster. And lo and behold, Priscilla Ron came forward as my headmaster for our school. And a week later, the building showed up. And so that’s Providence, I tell you.
SPEAKER 01 :
I love that. That’s our new favorite word, Providence. It’s like everything’s kind of coming into place, but we know there’s going to be bumps in the road. But there’s so many amazing people on the team. We’ve got Hoshi from Galloway, and her team’s amazing. And we’ve got the Lyceum with John Adams with the curriculum, and they’re amazing. And then we have Academica, who’s doing a lot of the backup. office work and they’re amazing so we’ve got we’re really starting to rock and roll oh and scholar lead is helping us with some of the online social media marketing and so i mean we’re building this team you’ve done this before you’re a master at it and we just want parents to be encouraged that Come and take a chance on us. We’re a new school, but we already know what our community is going to look like. And we want our parents to help us to further develop it. That’s the beauty of opening a new school is that all of our new parents can help us develop. What is that culture going to look like even further? We want parents to come in and volunteer, grandparents to come in and read. We want outside mentors to come in. And we just have so many opportunities. to build our dream school. And it’s right here in the Denver Metro area. We’re so close, right off of Dry Creek and I-25. So if you know where Maggiano’s Little Italy is, or Topgolf, depending on what you like to do. We’re between Topgolf and Maggiano. So… We have a lot of great ideas. So our students are going to engage in humanities, mathematics, physical education. They’ll also have free play time in addition to the calisthenics and the Olympic style physical education. They’ll have music and art every day, as well as Latin, science. And we’re going to have a garden where the students will be able to learn how to grow food. I mean, it’s just a wonderful, wonderful model. And then on Fridays, we’ll have a half day where our mentors will engage in the junto, that’s spelled J-U-N-T-O, where we’ll engage in the Socratic method. We’ll read, we’ll discuss, and then we’ll write about the things that we learned. And so it’s a really, really rigorous, elevated educational environment that we’re excited about. We talk multiple times a day, like we’re can’t stop talking about this school. We want the fall to be here and we want kids.
SPEAKER 03 :
So I think it’s important to point out that we’re not starting from scratch. We’re actually franchising an existing, successful classical curriculum from the John Adams Academy through the Lyceum, through a third party that we have licensed the IP that John Adams Academy has created. They have 5,000 students. They have a very, very successful program. And the children that are coming out of that program are just stellar. They have a solid foundation on what is right, what is truthful, what is beauty, and that has led them to virtue and wisdom. And we’re going to do the same thing. We’re starting with elementary school, Once we get the first couple of grades going here in the next year or two, then we’re going to put in a middle school and eventually we will have a high school. So the plan is to get a full up and going private classical education school based on the John Adams model.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, if I didn’t know who you are and I was listening to this episode, I would come to your school right away and trusting that as a father, a grandfather, a business developer, someone who has kept our nation alive. And the world’s safe. People should really look into secret because that’s quite amazing what you were able to do with NASA. I think that’s fascinating. I think that, oh, I should say our school is going to be very, very safe. So we want parents to know that we take the safety of our students seriously. and our educators very seriously, you know, considering unfortunately the climate in America, we wanna make sure that we are thoughtful in how we protect children and how we have procedures in place to keep children safe. But Scott, I’m looking at the time and we’re all out of time and so i want people to go to our website excaliburclassicalacademy.org we are doing tours please just reach out to us we have regular open out open house times but we can also do a private tour if your schedule needs to be uh specialized there But please look us up, Excalibur Classical Academy. We are part of the John Adams Lyceum of classical education. And to my listeners, thank you so much for tuning in and catch me next time. Remember, educating the mind without the heart is no education. So seek wisdom, cultivate virtue, and speak truth.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thanks for tuning in to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Rahn. Visit PriscillaRahn.com to connect or learn how you can sponsor future episodes to keep this message of faith, freedom, and education on the air.
