Our story starts in 1959 when Randall Reiners, our Founder, was born in Venezuela. But you don’t have time for that here, let’s just summarize and hit the highlights. His family moved often until his father took a job in St. Louis, Missouri, becoming a Vice President reporting to the CEO of one of the 50 largest corporations in the world. His parents believed in quality education and good work, and they selected a quality public school system for the family. Our Founder enjoyed high school, scored in the top 2% of SAT and ACT scores, earned state championships in two sports and picked up Eagle Scout honors along the way. 

Our Founder upset his father by turning down admission to Princeton University and attending a top-five-ranked engineering school, Iowa State University, where he was on the varsity wrestling team and training for the 1980 Olympic games. He also studied electrical engineering, earned 54 college credit hours, and made the Dean’s list in his freshman year. Our Founder then earned a BSBA at the University of Missouri and was named a top ten student. He applied for the Kellogg Business School at Northwestern University, while still an undergraduate. He was accepted and placed in an accelerated program to earn his MBA in one year instead of two. He was on the Dean’s list and graduated in 1984; that was also the year the Wall Street Journal ranked the Kellogg School graduating class number one in America, the first time the Harvard Business school did not receive that honor.

After earning his MBA, our Founder joined Malone & Hyde/AutoZone (the multibillion-dollar retail conglomerate) and was promoted four times in five years into a senior management position. AutoZone was a differentiated competitor in a big stodgy industry and grew to over a billion dollars with an initial public offering. Mr. Reiners then had some more business adventures, and he became the senior financial executive at the software company IPIX, which also had an initial public offering. Tempur-Pedic, the bedding company manufacturer, recruited Mr. Reiners to become Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and later elected him to the Board of Directors. This was the third company our Founder worked for that enjoyed a successful initial public offering and it was also a differentiated competitor in a stogy industry, like AutoZone.

Our Founder moved to Dallas Texas to work near family. In 2004 he was semi-retired and had been enjoying time with his seven-year old boy and five-year old girl. While he had picked a quality public school district, his son was not getting the same quality of education in first grade that Mr. Reiners remembered, so Mr. Reiners got involved in the school improvement/reform movement. A private group of donors invited Mr. Reiners to a conference on school reform and asked what he thought would improve education. Mr. Reiners said “you should create a differentiated competitor and introduce it to the K-12 industry so they can adopt it to benefit all children for free. Just like AutoZone with the auto industry and Temper-Pedic in the bedding industry.” This was another case of a big stodgy industry needing a differentiated competitor like AutoZone and Tempur-Pedic. The Gates Foundation told Mr. Reiners to do the research and they would give him a Twenty Million dollar grant to start the lab school.

From 2005 to 2007 Mr. Reiners did his homework and came up with a plan. The big idea was that “the school should fit the student and raise their performance according to their ability instead of the student fitting the school” and personalized education got a new burst of energy. The Gates Foundation had a change of management and objectives, so our Founder used his own money, and money raised from friends and family, to create the new school and open the doors in the fall of 2008. So, Yorktown Education (now Dominion Prep) was born.

Southern Methodist University (SMU) moved Yorktown to the SMU research campus in 2009 with experiments and testing to refine the system. SACS-AdvancED-Cognia accredited Yorktown in 2011. In 2013 the system continued refinement, moved to larger facilities, and Mr. Reiners gave 100% of his ownership (the super majority) to a not-for-profit charitable trust, which owns the rights and property of Yorktown Education and Dominion Prep.

From 2011 to 2020, the Yorktown personalized lab school continued to turn out unbelievable results for an open enrollment K-12 school. In 2015, the Founder left daily operations to work with national, state, and local governments, along with public school districts, to adopt the personalized learning program.

In January 2020 students from China came back from Christmas break and almost everyone at the Yorktown’s lab school caught “the flu ?”. We had two seniors taking our small Socratic instruction classes through remote video conferencing while they worked at the Vail Mountain Ski Resort. Yorktown Education had been successfully using this remote Socratic method for over a decade and integrating it with live class work. This has done well for athletes, actors, musicians, and families who enjoyed traveling, or others who could not be in person.

In Mid-March 2020 the Federal government declared the Covid crisis and the Texas Governor shut down the schools. Yorktown simply switched to the remote Socratic learning program for fourth grade and above, and ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE RESULTS INCREASED. Students continued to learn at high levels and finished classes a month early. But we also think that parents were not letting students go out and devoting more time to their schoolwork had an effect.

After four years, many broken promises from politicians, the educational establishment and grant makers, (while witnessing much corruption) it became apparent to our Founder that the education establishment is really driven by politicians who want to indoctrinate children for their political purposes and use the school funds for their objectives – not children. The education establishment will never move to real personalized learning, and they do not really care about your children. Mr. Reiners however never gave up easily.

The Governor also used the Covid crisis to cancel certain charter programs that Yorktown had been promised, and school districts and others in the educational establishment admitted they were never going to change after leading the Founder on for years. The Governor closing all the schools had a serious effect on new school enrollments. Yorktown’s international school franchise and programs were also closed “due to covid”. Yorktown was also promised two million dollars in new funding (covid related for damages) but this was not provided until two years later.

In the fall of 2020, the strategic review led to the decision to move from the Yorktown Education personalized program to a gifted, talents and achieving remote program that is now called Dominion Prep because:

• Covid pulled the curtain back on traditional schooling and it is shown to be lacking.
• Traditional Schools are slow to educate, improve, and achieving students are not permitted to accelerate.
• Low achieving students are the focus of government programs and money.
• Good parents do not trust their child’s education to the government.
• Parents can still get the social items and things like football from schools, but smart parents make sure their children are supplemented and educationally well fed.
• It only cost $2,000 in tuition per semester for Dominion Prep.