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FRISCO, TX
We built the school we wanted for our own children.
We are mothers first. We are educators second. The order matters.
Every academic decision at The Grove began as a decision we made for our own children. What to teach. How to assess. When to move on, and when to slow down. What it actually looks like when a child is learning, and what it looks like when a child is performing.
We searched for a school that taught the way we taught at home. Small groups. Honest assessment. Direct instruction. Reasoning treated as a skill, not a byproduct. A standard high enough that children rose to meet it.
We did not find one. So we built one.
The Grove is small by design. The instruction is direct. The assessment is honest. The standards are high. We run the school ourselves because the work we are asking of educators is the work we are willing to do every day.
Co-Founder · Head of the Seedlings Grove & Admissions
Mrs. Brittiona Lewis
Mrs. Brittiona Lewis is the co-founder of The Grove at Hearth, where she teaches the Seedlings and heads up admissions. She brings over a decade of leading global technology programs at a Fortune 20 company to her work in education, with a focus on how children should be prepared for the world they’ll actually work in.
She has designed and taught STEM and technology curriculum across multi-age settings, including math in K–2nd and 3rd–5th pods, middle school writing, and computer science for elementary and teen learners. Her teaching emphasizes clarity, rigor, and the belief that children should be taught to reason and build, not only to know.
CREDENTIALS
Bachelor of Business Administration in Management Information Systems, Texas Tech University.
Master of Science in Informatics, Texas Woman’s University.
Graduate Certification in Executive Management, SMU.
Graduate Certification in Business Analytics, Michigan State University.
Mrs. Brittiona lives in Lewisville, Texas with her husband Jeremiah and their daughter Jayde, whose education is the reason The Grove was built and the standard against which every Grove decision is measured.
LANE
Technology and education. Corporate experience as applied to how children should learn. Preparing children for the modern working world. Reasoning taught through building and making.
Co-Founder · Head of the Saplings and Evergreen Groves
Dr. Yunique Simpson, EdD
Dr. Yunique Simpson, EdD, is the co-founder of The Grove at Hearth and the lead teacher for the Saplings and Evergreen groves. She brings her doctorate in Leadership and Professional Practice and a decade of homeschooling her own children into the Grove’s oldest groves.
Her public voice on how children actually learn, on assessment and gifted education, and on the science of reasoning shapes the Grove’s academic identity beyond the classroom.
CREDENTIALS
Doctorate of Education (EdD), Trevecca Nazarene University.
Master of Business Administration, Strayer University.
Undergraduate credentials in biblical studies and business administration.
Prior leadership development work with youth-serving organizations including the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and The Salvation Army.
Dr. Yunique lives in North Texas with her children, whose education remains the proving ground for every pedagogical decision at The Grove.
LANE
Academic rigor. Assessment methodology. Gifted education. The science of how children actually learn. Reasoning as a taught discipline.
Two founders. Two lanes. One school.
Dr. Yunique — Reasoning is a discipline, not a personality trait.
Most schools treat reasoning as a quality some children happen to have. The research does not support that. Reasoning is a learned skill: the ability to take a problem apart, to make a claim, to defend the claim with evidence, and to revise the claim when the evidence changes. Children who are not taught to reason directly do not develop the skill on their own. They learn to recognize the right answer instead.
At The Grove, reasoning is taught the same way reading is taught. Explicitly. With a method. Every day. The first question in our classroom is rarely what is the answer. It is how did you get there.
Mrs. Brittiona — The world children will work in is not the world we were prepared for.
I spent over ten years leading global technology programs at one of the largest companies in the world. The people who succeeded in that environment were not the people who memorized the right answers. They were the people who could break a hard problem into parts, build something concrete, and explain their thinking to colleagues who did not share their assumptions.
That is exactly the work we ask of children at The Grove. Not because they need it for the next test. Because they will need it for their actual lives.
״The world my daughter will work in will not reward children who only know the right answer. It will reward children who can build, reason, and explain. We teach that, on purpose, every day.״
- Mrs. Brittiona Lewis, Co-Founder