Your school
is hurting.
Dr. Mark Earwood
has been here before.

Mark Earwood spent the first decade of his career not in education, but in the energy industry. He joined Entex Natural Gas in East Texas straight out of college and became, by his own account, the youngest local manager in his division. He managed P&Ls. He oversaw crews. He learned what it meant to lead people who had no particular reason to follow you except that you'd earned their respect.

But something was missing. In the mid-1990s, he walked away from the corporate track — a decision that surprised people who knew how good he was at it — to join his local church as Business Administrator. He wanted his work to mean something beyond a balance sheet.

The school came next, almost by accident. He taught his first class at Faith Academy in Marble Falls, Texas in 2000 and knew immediately this was what he was supposed to do. He spent the next eight years as Athletic Director and football coach — building the program, earning the culture, learning the school from the inside — before becoming Head of School in 2008. Within a decade of that, he had led the school's first ACSI accreditation, its first balanced budget, and built the kind of culture where an evaluator cried describing what he witnessed.

Three more schools followed. Each one different. Each one harder in its own way. A racial reconciliation crisis in North Carolina. A mid six-figure shortfall in Fort Worth, followed by COVID, followed by six inches of water through the entire building. A 36-student startup in Wyoming where he had to build every system from scratch, one final time.

He has now stepped back from running schools. What he hasn't stepped back from is caring about them. That's why he consults. Not because it's a business. Because he's seen what a Christian school can be when it's healthy — and he's seen what it costs when it isn't.