May 30, 2010 - By Chris Echegaray - THE TENNESSEAN -

Jeremy Kane started thinking something might be wrong with public education when he was in seventh grade.

His parents decided to pull him out of a Metro Nashville school and enroll him in private, upscale Montgomery Bell Academy.

It took him two years to catch up.

"I was wondering how could it be so different between private and public schools," said Kane, 31, founder and director of charter school http://www.leadacademy.org/">LEAD Academy. "I look back, and it was the guiding question."

His passion for improving public education prompted him to study everything he could about charter school education, taking out a $25,000 mortgage to travel the country, talking to administrators and touring classrooms, and write federal grant applications for his own startup. This year, the Metro Nashville school board voted to turn a troubled middle school over to him to run.

It marks the first time in Tennessee that a charter school has been asked to take over a public school. Kane's transition into Cameron Middle School leadership will begin a grade at a time, starting in 2011. LEAD currently houses grades 5-8, but beginning this fall will add a grade each year until it includes a full high school — Metro's first charter high school.

There's a 300-person waiting list to get into LEAD, which will enroll 390 students next school year.

District Director Jesse Register said he's confident Metro's partnership with Kane to run Cameron Middle will be a success.

"I think he's doing an excellent job. ... He's a bright young man who I think is very innovative and has a lot to offer," Register said. "This is a turnaround strategy, rather than a starting-a-school strategy, which is what you see with charters."

Charter schools are run with public money and approved through the school district but launched and operated by independent groups. The idea is that freeing them from bureaucracy allows for innovative ideas and better learning.

At Kane's North Nashville school, housed in the former St. Vincent de Paul Catholic school building, the focus is post-secondary education. Kane's Stanford University diploma hangs in his office, and all his teachers must hang diplomas in their classrooms.

The students at LEAD come from all over Davidson County, and about 90 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

Old classmate joins him

Kane can barely get down the hallways for kids wanting to stop him and talk about their accomplishments. One day last week, a girl saw him standing in the main office and asked him to autograph her notebook, sharing that her birthday was coming up. Kane signed the notebook and rushed to the gym for the eighth-grade recognition ceremony, shaking hands, telling boys to tuck in their polo shirts — part of the school's strict uniform policy.

And even though it was the last day of school, attendance was 97 percent.

Where Kane is upbeat and personable, his dean of students and Montgomery Bell classmate, Michael Risen, is level and firm. In high school, Risen was on the debate team and Kane on the swim team — he missed competing in the 1996 Olympics by five seconds.

Risen said he wouldn't have described their relationship as a friendly one, more like a healthy competition between "dork and jock."

"I would have never thought this would happen … going to his wedding and working with him. If you told my mother this would happen, she'd say you were crazy," Risen said.

The two were reunited as adults at Montgomery Bell. They both taught there before Kane recruited Risen to come work at LEAD. Both said they wanted to get on the ground level of improving education.

Jeff Kane, Jeremy's father and a Presbyterian minister, moved his wife, two sons and two daughters to Los Gatos, Calif., to take over a church there. Jeremy attended Stanford on a swimming scholarship — "the $150,000 swim," his father called it. He met and dated Chelsea Clinton, former President Bill Clinton's daughter, for two years, ending the relationship amicably enough that he ended up with speechwriter gigs for her father and on Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign.

He remembered writing a speech for Clinton for a public employees union. It was completely rewritten by his superiors, and then rewritten by the president himself. The lesson Kane extracted: Speeches aren't about overwrought writing. They're about delivering a message in tune with one's values and beliefs, resonating with the audience. Good leaders can do that, he said.

While in Washington, he met his wife, the former Tracy Dry of Franklin. She'd just finished American University and was eager to enter into her field of international relations, but she hesitated because their relationship was new.

Kane persuaded her to go to China.

"It redefined the meaning of a long-distance relationships," he said. "It was before Skype. We did that for two years. Here I am inspiring people to follow their dreams. I just met my wife and told her to go to China."

Today, the couple have been married for six years, and Tracy Kane just finished law school at Vanderbilt University, where her husband received his master's in education.

His heart's in education

He adopted "whatever it takes" as an education mantra early on. It's one that Alan Coverstone, Metro's executive director of charter schools, said Kane lives by.

"He is focused and deliberate at what he does, and he is about no excuses," Coverstone said. "He's had his heart in education for as long as I've known him."

For Kane, that means waking up at 4:30 a.m. to read three or four newspapers. He gets to school well before the 7:15 a.m. start time for students and starts answering e-mail. He's still there hours after the final bell at 4:15 p.m.

And while he doesn't have the Pacific Ocean in California anymore, he can hit the pool at his gym when he really wants to relax.

"You have to turn the cell phone off once in a while," he said.

Additional Facts
JEREMY KANE
Age: 31

Position: founder and director of LEAD Academy Public Charter School, former executive director of the Tennessee Charter Schools Association

Education: bachelor’s degree in history/classics from Stanford University and master’s in education from Vanderbilt University

Family: wife, Tracy Dry Kane