Stopping Rural Brain Drain With Free AI

if you spend enough time in, you know, a faculty launch or hanging out in the district office after a board meeting, there's this very specific kind of exhaustion that just hangs in the air. Yeah. It's not just the long hours. It's, it's the feeling of trying to prep students for a 2030 economy, using like a curriculum from 2015 and a budget from 1990. It's the speed mismatch. That's what it is. You're watching the world outside the classroom, just accelerate AI, remote work, all of it. While inside the system, just changing a textbook takes what 18 months of committee meetings. Precisely. And that gap, that's what creates the one sentence every single educator has heard. Oh, yeah. It's usually from a former student. All right. Maybe five years after graduation, they come back and they say, I really wish you guys had taught me this and school. And this is always the practical stuff. Like how to do my taxes without having a meltdown. Right. How credit card interest actually works, you know, to budget. Exactly. But lately that list has gotten a lot shorter. Right. And a lot to sharper. Now it's, why didn't you teach me how to use AI? And for a lot of our listeners, especially in rural districts, the superintendents, the principals and small towns, there's this whole other much darker layer to it. It's the brain drain. Oh, absolutely. You pour your heart and soul into these kids, give them everything you've got. And then they leave. They leave. They move to the city because the story they've been told is that there are no jobs, no future, no cool factor in their hometown. It's like a tragic export model. You're exporting your best talent and you're just importing decline. But today, we're doing a deep dive on a proposal that claims it can stop that cycle cold. Okay. We're looking at a partnership model called the Black Hills Consortium or BHC. I want to be really clear right up front. Yeah. This isn't a vendor pitch. That's a huge distinction because usually when someone comes to a school with a solution, they're trying to sell you a software license or some consulting package. Right. This is different. This is a partnership proposal. And it's coming out of Custer, South Dakota of all places. It's designed to pump resources into schools. I'm talking free curriculum, free hardware, even infrastructure. All without the school board having to, you know, pass a levy or write some huge federal grant. Exactly. Which to any seasoned administrator listening that immediately sounds suspicious, free in education usually comes with a massive headache. For sure. So our mission today is to really unpack this BHC model. Look at the builder behind it and figure out, you know, is this a real viable solution for rural schools? Or is it just another tech fantasy? You have to start with the builder. Because if some random tech guy walks into a superintendents office and says, let me teach your kids, they're getting laughed out of the room. Credibility is everything. And the founder is a guy named Luke Alvarez. And his resume is really the first big green flag for any educator. He didn't come from crypto or social media. He came from Canvas. And structure, yep. The learning management system that, I mean, let's be honest, it pretty much runs American education. That changes the conversation immediately. It just does. Yeah. Because he understands the friction of adoption. He gets that if you hand a teacher a new log in, a new platform, a whole separate dashboard, it's going to die on the vine. It has to live where the work is already happening. Yes. He understands the architecture of the classroom. But Alvarez isn't just an ed tech guy. The origin story of the Black Hills Consortium is actually this technical proof of concept he calls the 60 day sprint. And this is really where we get into the why behind the AI curriculum. Okay. This part of the research was fascinating to me. It sounds like something out of a movie. Walk us through what he actually did in those two months. So Luke moves to Custer, a town with a population of like 2000 people. And he sets this insane challenge for himself. He uses AI tools to build the entire infrastructure for 11 different companies. 11 companies. 11 in just 60 days. And I want to be specific about the how here because this isn't just, you know, asking chat GPT to write a poem. Right. Let's get a little technical. What was he using? What's in the stack? He was using tools like Claude for the high level strategy, the legal structuring, that sort of thing. But the real linchpin was a tool called cursor. Okay. Explain cursor for the non-technical folks listening because that seems to be the key. Think of it like an AI powered code editor. I mean, traditionally to build a software platform, you need a whole team of engineers, right? A front end person, a back end person, a database manager. Cursor lets one person basically act as that entire team. Wow. It predicts what you're trying to build. And it just, it writes the complex code for you. So, Alva has used these force multipliers to generate legal docs, build functional software, acquire real estate, and set up a whole 15 acre campus. So the whole argument is, look, I compressed what should have been 10 years of economic development into 60 days using these tools. Exactly. And that is the hook for the schools. The pitch isn't teacher kids accounting because coding itself is changing. The pitches, imagine if your high school seniors were fluent in these exact same tools. Imagine what a 17 year old could build. Right. It shifts the whole focus from like computer science to builder science. Okay. So that's the philosophy. But let's get into the actual offer. If a school district partners with the seed foundation, that's the nonprofit arm. What do they actually get? Because the outline mentions curriculum, hardware, and infrastructure. Let's take them one by one. First, curriculum. This is the easiest part for the school. They offer a complete AI literacy course. But because Alvarez is from the canvas world, it's deployed directly onto the school's existing canvas site. So no IT integration nightmare. It's just there. It's just there. And it's not some dry textbook. It's the literal internal training material BHC uses for their own employees. Just, you know, adapted for students. So a kid who passes this course is theoretically qualified to walk into a job at BHC. And they're also tackling that whole financial literacy problem we talked about at the start. Yes. They've partnered with Caleb Hammer. Wait, the dollar-wise guy? The guy who yells at people on YouTube about their budgets? That's the one. Which I know it sounds funny, but think about the engagement. Kids actually watch him on TikTok. BHC just adapted his content for K-12. So you're learning about budgeting and taxes from a creator they actually recognize. Not some PDF from 2002. That's just smart. It meets them where they are. Okay, so that's the software. But what about the hardware, the student package? Because this seems, well, it seems really expensive and aggressive. It is aggressive. The goal is to professionalize the student body. Every student in a partner school gets a laptop and a power bank. That's pretty standard. But they also get a full professional wardrobe. Hold on, like actual suits in a public high school. Actual suits, jackets, blazers, pants, belts, shoes. It's all donated by a partner brand called And Collar, which makes this stretchy, performance fabric professional wear. I could just hear the teachers listening to this roll in their eyes thinking. Yeah, good luck getting a 10th creator to wear a blazer. It sounds totally counterintuitive, I know. But the psychology behind it is fascinating. They're trying to break that kid in a hoodie mindset. The idea is when you dress for a role, your behavior starts to shift. Why? They want these students to see themselves as young executives. Not just pupils. It's about signaling to them, we take you seriously. So you should take yourself seriously. It's that enclosed cognition theory. You think differently when you dress differently. Okay, I can see the vision. But the third part, infrastructure. This is the one that I think will make rural superintendents really sit up and listen. Oh, absolutely. This is about closing the homework gap. I mean, you can give a kid a laptop, but if they live five miles out of town with spotty internet, that laptop is just a fancy paperweight. And the usual solution is waiting for a federal broadband grant that takes what, five years to actually lay fiber. BHC isn't waiting. Their solution is a starlink initiative. Their goal is to just saturate their partner towns with starlink internet dishes. So they're just bypassing the local ISPs and all the government delays? It's a move fast and fix things approach. They solve the connectivity problem instantly so that all the other stuff, the curriculum, can actually work. Okay, so you've got the kids dressed like pros, they have the tech, the high speed connection. But if you stop there, don't you just create a better equipped student who still leaves town the second they graduate? That is the core challenge. And that's where the career pipeline part comes in. BHC has completely reimagined the senior project. Okay, how? In most schools, right, a senior project is a paper, maybe a poster board presentation in the gym. Here, students develop actual business concepts using those AI tools we talked about and then they pitch them. A teachers. No, to real venture capitalists, BHC hosts this thing called the three day investor experience at their campus in Custer, which they call the grow campus. For the grow campus. Yep, and this place is a big deal. It's 15 acres. It has a cafe called the UP, a sports complex, a theater. I mean, it's designed to look like a Google or Apple campus just dropped into the middle of the black hills. They fly investors in, give them the tour, and then put them in a room to hear pitches from high school seniors. That is incredibly high stakes for a 17-year-old. It is. But it's real world validation. And the goal is what BHC calls the poach me philosophy. Oach me? They want their students to be so sharp, so fluent in AI and business that the visiting investors try to hire them on the spot. They want to turn the rural student from, you know, a charity case into a scarce resource that big companies are actually fighting over. So the message to the student is, you don't have to go to San Francisco to find the action. The action is coming right here to you. Exactly. It completely re-contextualizes their home. It's not the middle of nowhere anymore. It's an innovation hub. Okay, I have to be the skeptical superintendent here. I've been in education for a long time. I hear free suits, free starling, free curriculum, VCs flying in. And my too good to be true alarm is screaming. Who is paying for this? That's the right question. Because schools are used to grants running out after three years and leaving them holding the bag. So what's the sustainability model? The answer is in the revenue model, which they call the flywheel. BHC creates its own revenue streams that then fund the education side so the schools don't have to. Okay, break that down for me. Where is the cash coming from? Three main places. First, tourism. Custer is right near Mount Rushmore to huge tourist spot. So the campus cafe, the merchandise, the events that profit pays for the student costs. So tourists buy coffee and that buys a kid a laptop. Basically, yeah. The second bucket is corporate partners. And this is clever. Think about the big narrative around AI right now. What's the headline? AI is stealing all our jobs. The robots are coming. Exactly. So companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, they have a huge PR problem. BHC offers them a counter narrative. Sponsor our auditorium, put your name on our theater and you get to say you're creating jobs in rural America. Ah, reputation management. Or, you know, halo effect marketing. Precisely, the Anthropic auditorium, that marketing money flows into the foundation. And the third bucket is the investors themselves. BHC has a rule. If a VC wants access to the startups being built in their accelerator, they have to donate to the foundation first. It's like a toll booth. You want to shot at the next big thing. You have to fund the high school first. Correct. And they run on this no waste philosophy. Every asset makes money. When the podcast studio isn't being used, it's rented out. That surplus revenue just keeps the flywheel spinning. So for the school administrator, the financial cost really is zero. But there's always a cost. What's the ask? If I'm a superintendent and I want in, what do I have to commit to? It's a commitment of engagement, not money. First, you have to actually implement the curriculum. Since it's on Canvas, it's not hard logistically, but you do have to make space for it in the schedule. You have to prioritize it. Right. Second, you have to show up. Send your students to the pitch days. Put them on the bus for field trips to the campus. And third, you have to participate in their annual convention, which they call the cult. A little edgy. Show it for cultivation. It fits their brand. But notice what's not on that list. No tax levies. No grant writing. No getting permission from the state board to accept federal money. It's a private donation model, so it bypasses all the red tape that usually kills innovation in schools. It moves at the speed of business, not the speed of government, which, speaking of speed, there was a specific note in the research about urgency. Why should a district do this now? Why not wait and see if it works somewhere else first? There are two big pressures here. First is a hardware prediction. The sources cite an analyst, Alex Finn, who predicts that Mac hardware prices could literally triple by 2027. So a $1,000 laptop becomes a $3,000 laptop. Right, so for a school district, if you don't equip your students now or partner with someone who will, you might be priced out of the market in three years. You'll be stuck with Chromebooks while everyone else moves to high compute machines. So getting those laptops now is a hedge against that inflation. Exactly. And the second pressure is just the speed of AI itself. We've seen how fast these tools evolve. I mean, there are weekly updates. If your school's curriculum cycle is three years, you're teaching history, not technology. You're teaching students how to use tools that don't exist anymore. BHC updates their curriculum constantly because they use it to run their own companies. By partnering, a school gets to draft behind a fast-moving tech company. You're basically outsourcing your R&D. That's a powerful argument. You admit the school system can't move that fast so you hit your wagon to something that can. It aligns the incentives. They need the talent. You need successful graduates. So let's do now. We've covered the what and the how. But I want to land on the why. If this works, and I know it's a big if, but if it really works, what does the future of these towns look like? It looks like choice. I mean, right now rural students grow up with this understanding that success means leaving. If I want to be someone, I have to go somewhere else. The BHC vision is that the founders of tomorrow could be building the next huge AI companies from their hometowns. Because the infrastructure is there. The talent pipeline is there. And the mentorship is there. It changes the entire psychology of a community from just surviving to thriving. You stop being a place people come from and you start being a place people come to. It's interesting. Luke Alvarez, the founder, he uses this quote that I think frames it perfectly for anyone listening who's an educator. It's the old Greek proverb. A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit. I mean, that's the job description of a teacher, isn't it? You pour everything into a kid for 12 years, knowing you might never see the adult they finally become. It is. And I think the provocative thought for the listener today is this. As an educator, are you waiting for a government grant to plant that tree? Because we all know that grant might never come. Or are you willing to partner with someone who's standing right there holding a shovel ready to dig now? That's really the question. The barrier isn't money anymore. It's the willingness to just step outside the traditional box. If you're a superintendent or a principal, and you want to see if the shovel's real, if you want to know if this is just hype, the call to action is simple. Go there. Yeah. They encourage educators to just visit the grow campus and custer, see the operation, eat the food at the app app, watch the students in action. It's one thing to hear about it. It's another thing to stand in the room and see it happening. And hey, even if you don't sign up, a trip to the Black Hills is not a bad way to spend a couple of days. It's hard to beat the view. Thank you for joining us on this deep dive. It's a different kind of topic for us, but one that could really reshape the whole landscape of rural education. Absolutely. It's about the future of where we live and how we learn. We'll catch you on the next one. Yeah.