March 8, 2025 & March 15/16, 2025: Attended the Orange City Movie in the Park and Lake Helen Strawberry Festival. Met many excited members of the community who overwhelmingly expressed interest and excitement at having a new school open in the area. Gathered over 250 signatures on our way to the 400 needed for the application.

Application deadline: August 19, 2025

January 31, 2025: Signed a contract with Carvelli and Associates which will guarantee a completed application. We divided the sections between John’s people and ours, set a schedule of completion, and set a payment structure.

Revised planned opening (due to the State’s application review schedule) = August 2027

December 18, 2024: Toured several Orange City and Deland sites with Frank to identify possible pieces of land that we can purchase.

November 22, 2024: Signed a contract with Frank Dino to get a school built. Frank and his people will be helping us to locate and acquire land, write the bond for funding, and designing and building TDI STEM Academy.

Planned opening = August 2026

November 13, 2024: Met with members of VMA (Volusia Manufacturing Association) to connect and develop a partnership with them in bringing manufacturing to the STEM Academy.

July 7, 2024: Filed application for 501c3, tax exempt status - awaiting approval.

January 30, 2024: Filed articles for our non-profit corporation, Teacher Driven Innovation, Inc.

October 2023: Attended the Florida Charter School Conference in Orlando. Met Frank Dino, of FPDino, and John Carvelli, of Carvelli and Associates. Frank is a project manager who is familiar with the process involved in opening up a charter school in Florida. John and his group assist in writing the extensive application required by the state for acquiring a charter.

December 2022 - September 2023: Held bi-weekly meetings with the core group of teachers to hammer out major concepts for what an entire school built upon the original STEM program would look like.

November 2022: Presented our STEM program at the FAST (Florida Association of Science Teachers) conference. Was approached by Dr. Sue Beddard, iBuild Academy, who suggested that put the program back into practice and open a school for ourselves. We shifted our focus from writing the book to writing a charter application.

Summer 2022: Began writing a book to share what we had accomplished with the program.

August 2016 - May 2021: Ran our STEM program in a public middle school with great results. In 2019, we were featured in the Daytona Beach News Journal.