Lessons from Local Leaders:

Dr. Frank + Dr. Jenn

The School That Was Never the Plan: How Dr. Frank Monroe and Dr. Jenn Krasinski Built Phoenix Nova Around the Kids Who Needed Them Most

He was praying on a bridge in Kansas City. She was looking for a shirt for her sister. Three weeks and a denim jumper later, the seeds of a school that would change children’s lives were already planted.

Dr. Frank Monroe will tell you the whole story in full detail. He remembers exactly what Dr. Jenn Krasinski was wearing when she appeared on that bridge. He remembers the store she was looking for, the tea shop they ended up in when it turned out she doesn’t drink coffee, and the exact quality of the conversation that followed — the one where two strangers discovered they both loved theater and working with kids and had somehow been building toward the same idea from completely different directions.

Jenn will shake her head at some of the details. But she won’t argue with the outcome.

“This was not in our plans,” she says. “Like, yes, I have a background in education. But I had never thought that this is what was gonna happen.”

What happened was Phoenix Nova School — a K through eight adaptive inclusive school in Northern Virginia that serves children at all different levels of needs, blends neurotypical students and students with disabilities in the same classrooms, and operates on a philosophy so simple it sounds obvious until you realize how rarely anyone actually practices it: presume competence.

Every single time they do, the kids rise to meet it.

A Bridge in Kansas City

Frank had been living in Kansas City for fifteen years. The morning he met Jenn, he was standing on a bridge over a little river in the Plaza district, drinking coffee and doing the thing people do when they’ve been going through the motions long enough to know something needs to change.

“I was talking to God,” he says. “I’m like, God, help me figure out what I’m supposed to be doing. What’s my path?”

And then Jenn appeared — tall, golden-haired, wearing a denim jumper, looking for a store to buy a shirt for her traveling nurse sister. Frank knew where the store was. He walked her there. They talked the entire way about theater, education, working with kids. By the time they reached the destination, neither of them wanted the conversation to end.

The seed for Educate Theater Camp — their first venture together, built around using theater to teach social and life skills to children with different needs — was planted in that walk. The rest of the afternoon was spent at a tea shop. They kept talking on the phone for weeks after Jenn flew back east. Frank eventually moved to the east coast. And the curriculum they had been developing kept growing.

“It was kind of like finding the missing jigsaw piece,” Frank says. “And it just fits perfectly in the puzzle.”

Three Weeks Over Winter Break

The school itself was never the plan. Phoenix Nova came into being because a school where Frank and Jenn were running theater classes closed unexpectedly, and the parents of those students reached out in a panic: their kids needed somewhere to go. Could Frank and Jenn do something?

In three weeks over winter break, with Frank’s savings and three rented offices in a shared suite, they pulled eight students together and started teaching.

“We were like, okay, we’re not going to do eight individual homeschooling sessions,” Jenn says. “So we pulled everyone together.”

More families found them. They outgrew the offices. Last year they moved into a dedicated space and tripled their student population in a single year. Now they’re working on getting certified to add ninth grade through twelfth grade — because the students who found them at Phoenix Nova have parents who cannot imagine sending them anywhere else.

“The more kids we can help, the better,” Frank says. “Full stop.”

Presume Competence

If Phoenix Nova has a founding philosophy, it’s this: every child can do more than you think, and the moment you stop believing that about them, you’ve already limited what’s possible.

“If I tell you every single day of your life that you can’t climb a tree, you’re never even gonna try,” Frank says. “If I tell you every single day that you can — you’re gonna climb that tree every single day of your life.”

Children arrive at Phoenix Nova sometimes carrying years of documentation — IEPs, behavioral reports, records from schools where they were segregated into separate rooms and told in a thousand direct and indirect ways what they couldn’t do. The Phoenix Nova team looks at that history, but they don’t let it set the ceiling.

“We give them a chance here,” Jenn says. “We see what they can do. We start by assuming they can do it. If they need accommodations or modified work, we implement that. But we start from the assumption that they can, and they shine. Every single time. I’m surprised every single day.”

The integration of speech therapists, occupational therapists, and applied behavior analysis therapists — all working collaboratively in the same environment rather than in siloed sessions — makes it possible to address each child’s needs in real time, in context, as part of the natural flow of the school day. It’s a model most schools don’t offer, and it shows in the outcomes.

When Kids Write Letters

Frank cries easily. He has made peace with this.

“I’m known at our school for being a big softie,” he says. “I cry almost daily over something the kids say or do.”

He tells the story of a student who had been to different public schools, different private schools, had been homeschooled, and had never had a friend. When she came to Phoenix Nova, something shifted. At the end of the school year, she wrote a letter to her classmates thanking them — because for the first time in her life, she felt like she belonged somewhere.

Frank read the letter, picked it up, and walked it directly to Jenn.

“It still has tear stains on it,” he says.

It’s a story that explains what Phoenix Nova is doing at a level that enrollment numbers and curriculum descriptions can’t touch. The kids at this school act like siblings, Jenn says — sometimes squabbling the way siblings do, but always looking out for each other. Neurotypical students learn intuitively and naturally to see the strengths in their classmates with different needs, not because they’re being instructed to, but because they grow up alongside them and the friendship develops organically.

“When you focus on what we all have in common,” Frank says, “it’s very easy to not focus on the differences.”

The Ice Cream Shop

Every year, Phoenix Nova students build something together that nobody planned — and this year, they decided they wanted an ice cream shop.

They built one. In the lounge. With paper ice cream cones, their own signage, and a very clear organizational structure: the kid who’s great at math became the cashier; the kid who’s great at making things out of paper took charge of production. They assigned roles based on each other’s strengths without being told to. Frank watched it happen and recognized immediately that it was exactly how the whole school works.

He bought an ice cream maker. Now he’s trying to figure out how to turn it into a small business they can actually run.

“I’m trying to figure out how we can make this into something real for them,” he says. “So they can have a piece of it and be a part of it.”

The ice cream shop arrived entirely because the students wanted it. The curriculum grows in the same direction — toward whatever the kids are genuinely excited about, with entrepreneurship, STEAM, the arts, and life skills woven through all of it. One student asks Frank every single day if there are any jobs she can do. He’s always trying to find her one.

“This is their school,” Jenn says. “It’s not our school.”

Dr. Spellman and the Spellathon

The school’s signature fundraiser is a masterclass in how to make the hard thing feel like the best day of the year.

Students were struggling with spelling when Phoenix Nova first opened. The team worked on it all year. Frank, channeling his theater background, created an alter ego: Dr. Spellman, a magnificently villainous mad scientist. The kids became superheroes. The fundraiser became the Spellathon — a 200-word spelling test set inside an event with a prize wheel, trivia breaks, bubble machines, lights, and, memorably, confetti cannons that Jenn has strong feelings about.

“We got to teach the kids vacuuming and cleaning up after themselves,” Frank says, with the energy of a man who stands behind his choices.

Students collect pledges for each word they spell correctly, with adaptations built in for every learner so that everyone participates and no one is left out. Outside donors can sponsor a student or make a flat donation. When a student gets an outside donor they don’t know, something lights up in them — someone out there believes in me. The second annual Spellathon is coming up April 24th.

“We gotta kick it up a notch,” Frank says.

A snow machine is reportedly already on its way.

The Curriculum That Reaches Beyond the Classroom

Because Phoenix Nova can’t be everywhere — though the idea of eventually opening more locations lives in the back of both their minds — Jenn has spent years developing something that can travel: the Adaptive Friends Curriculum.

Ten children’s books, each one teaching kids about a different disability through the lens of empathy, friendship, and presumed competence. Each book shows what a child with a particular need might struggle with — and what they’re incredibly good at. It shows other children how to be a genuinely good friend without being a helper, how to see the whole person.

The characters are personal. Jenn’s uncle Timmy, who has muscular dystrophy, helped her write that book. Frank’s name is in there. Students and teachers are there too. The curriculum that accompanies the books is available for schools, teachers, and homeschool parents — a way for Phoenix Nova’s philosophy to take root in classrooms and living rooms far beyond Northern Virginia.

“If we can get that out there,” Jenn says, “and kids start learning this from a young age — like what we see in our school, where it’s so seamless and so natural — imagine what that could do.”

The Leap

Both Frank and Jenn come back, in different ways, to the same essential idea: this life requires a willingness to take the leap.

Frank was on a bridge asking God what he was supposed to do with his life when the answer appeared in a denim jumper. Jenn was chasing a practical errand and ended up in a conversation that redirected her career. They started a school in three weeks with savings and rented offices because a group of children needed somewhere to go and no one else was going to do it.

They’ve been living on faith since.

“I think that’s the difference,” Frank says, “between people who actually do something in this world and people who just go through the motions. The people who go through the motions have just never had the courage to take that leap. If you do — trust me — it’s gonna pay off.”

Grades nine through twelve are coming. A women’s retreat in Sedona? Different podcast. But this school, this philosophy, these children who write tear-stained letters and run paper ice cream shops and ask every day if there’s a job they can do — this is the thing that was always supposed to happen.

It just took a bridge in Kansas City to get it started.

Dr. Frank Monroe and Dr. Jenn Krasinski are the co-founders and directors of Phoenix Nova School, an adaptive inclusive K–8 school in Northern Virginia. To enroll, donate, sponsor a student in the Spellathon, or access the Adaptive Friends Curriculum, visit phoenixnovaschool.com.

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