About the Founder
Hi, I’m Brie Nicole.
I’ve always known I wanted to teach. What I didn’t know, at least not at first, is that my path wouldn’t be a traditional classroom.
Arborum Academy grew out of a simple belief: kids deserve better than the world we’re handing them. And if we want the future to look different, then education has to be different too.
This school is the work of a curious, creative, deeply ADHD mind that has never accepted “that’s just the way things are.” I’m someone who writes constantly, reads everything, asks too many questions, and wants to understand how people think and why society works the way it does. I care a lot about fairness, about kids, about the people who are always overlooked.
But this school wasn’t born from theory.
It came from lived experience.
The Moment Everything Shifted
When I was 18, I moved out of my grandparents’ stable, middle-class home and into a lower-income neighborhood with my boyfriend at the time. It was my first experience with real financial insecurity, and it opened my eyes fast.
I met teenagers who were every bit as smart, capable, and imaginative as the kids I grew up with, yet their opportunities were a fraction of what mine had been. They told me what they could have done, what they would have explored, if their schools had offered the same programs and support I took for granted.
And the truth became painfully clear:
The only difference between us was the ZIP code we were born in and whether someone was there to catch us when we fell.
When I couldn’t pay rent, my grandma sent money. Without that help, I wouldn’t have climbed out of that situation. Many of the people around me never had anyone like her.
They didn’t have mentors.
They didn’t have examples of success.
They didn’t have a roadmap to anything beyond survival.
That experience radicalized me in the best way.
It shaped the kind of educator, and human, I wanted to become.
Realizing the Problem Was Bigger Than One Classroom
In 2024, when Trump won the presidential election, everything I had witnessed snapped into place.
The polarization.
The misinformation.
The bigotry.
The inability to spot manipulation or analyze media.
The lack of historical understanding.
All of it traced back to broken educational systems. And the students hit hardest by the things he would begin to do would be the same ones I’d lived beside, the ones who already had the least.
That was the moment I knew:
I can’t just teach. I have to build something.
Something rooted.
Something humane.
Something that doesn’t abandon kids because the system around them is collapsing.
Why Arborum Exists
Arborum Academy is the school I wish those kids had. The school I wish every kid had.
A place that teaches critical thinking, compassion, creativity, and curiosity, because that’s what the world is starving for.
A place that invests in public education instead of competing with it, through real financial support for Title I schools.
A place that refuses to replicate the inequities, pressures, and failures of traditional schooling.
A place that believes learning should feel like growth, not survival.
Who I Am Outside the Titles
I’m empathetic, inquisitive, and unreasonably passionate about building things that make life better for the next generation.
I’m the person who stays up too late thinking about how to fix problems no one else wants to touch.
And I’m endlessly hopeful, because young people give me every reason to be.
Why I Built This School
Because the systems around us are cracking. Because the world our kids are inheriting is chaotic, confusing, and often frightening.
And because I believe, with my whole heart, that education is how we build a better future, one that’s fairer, kinder, safer, and smarter.
Arborum is my promise to students:
You will be seen. You will be supported. And you will never be underestimated.