ABOUT QUIDDITY CONSULTING LLC
WE UNDERSTAND EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP
WHO WE ARE
JEF FOWLER, President & CEO
Jef served as the Head of School of Veritas Academy in Austin, Texas for 18 years until retiring in the summer of 2023, though he continues as a member of the School and Trustee Boards. His strengths are vision (seeing what doesn’t exist but could/should), discernment, relational leadership, and personal/professional humility and equanimity, especially visible in times of uncertainty and crisis when he thrives due to his high tolerance for ambiguity and risk.
Prior to co-founding Veritas Academy in 2004, Jef was an experienced business owner, operator, and consultant, having started and/or served as a senior/C-level (CFO/COO/CEO) executive officer at several high-growth companies in Houston and Austin. He earned an MBA in Finance from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin and is a former CPA, possessing years of M&A, corporate finance, and strategic/financial consulting experience with Big Four accounting and consulting firms. Jef has even more years of entrepreneurial business and church administration/board experience, and has also served the National Association for University-Model Schools (NAUMS) as an advisory board member and new school trainer for many years.
STARRLA FOWLER, COO
Since Veritas Academy’s inception in 2004, Starrla served in various capacities as the Academic Dean, Academic Team Chair, Grammar School Head, and School of Logic Head, in addition to her continued service on the Veritas School Board and its Governance and Nominations committee. Previous to Veritas, Starrla was a summa cum laude graduate of the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin, an accomplished public school educator and teacher trainer in Houston, and then an owner/operator of a retail establishment in the Houston Galleria.
While at Veritas, Starrla has developed curricula and academic programs, trained hundreds of teachers, served on accreditation teams for similar schools, and helped many classical, collaborative schools launch and grow. She is passionate about Kingdom building through the expansion of classical, Christian schools; and after receiving her Masters in Educational Leadership through Gordon College in Boston, shifted her focus to developing programs for training future Christian school leaders. The Fowlers live in the Texas Hill Country and are the parents of three adult children, all graduates of Veritas Academy, five dogs, and one surviving barn cat.
OUR STORY
In the early 2000s, after spending three years as parents in an excellent classical Christian school community, Jef & Starrla Fowler found themselves deeply desiring more time with their young children and a greater role in their education at such formative ages. It was then that they stumbled across a model of K-12 education that provided both the time and position to regain their role as primary influencers of their children. That genuinely collaborative model between parents and the school was called a “university-model”(1) for the college-like course schedule it featured, with students spending alternate days on campus for professional instruction mixed with parent-guided application and discipleship at home on the other days. As students matured, their time spent on campus would gradually increase.
Intrigued by this unique, hybrid combination of on-campus and at-home instruction and genuine parent partnership, the Fowlers invited two other couples to explore with them this rather innovative option for K-12 education. Already fully committed to classical, Christian education, their search for a collaborative—a.k.a., hybrid, blended, or university-model® school—that employed classical curricula and pedagogy proved fruitless; so they began to feel called to start one. A fourth couple soon joined them, and they would spend the next year-and-a-half preparing to open the doors of one of the first classical Christian collaborative schools in the country…virtually in the shadow of one of the nation’s most established and successful classical Christian schools in Austin, Texas. That school would grow from 500 to almost 1,200 students in the time that Veritas Academy went from 0 to almost 700 students.
(1)In K-12 education, the term “university-model” is a registered trademark belonging to the National Association of University-Model Schools (NAUMS), an organization headquartered in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex that promotes and supports the startup and sustainability of schools employing this model, or operating structure, that the organization certifies in order to ensure a level of quality. (NAUMS also operates under the name University-Model Schools International (UMSI).)
OUR MOTIVATION
Since retiring in the summer of 2023 from their long-time positions as Head of School and School of Logic Head (and Academic Team Chair), respectively, Jef and Starrla remain members of Veritas Academy’s school and trustee boards and assist with the academy’s 5th pillar of serving as a resource to similar schools throughout the country.
Over the past two decades, the Fowlers have been deeply involved in the leadership of Veritas—operating in almost every capacity at some point along the way—and through it have made a lifetime commitment to furthering this type of education across the United States. Quiddity Consulting grew out of this commitment to improve education through the strengthening of senior leaders in classical Christian schools.