This week from Austin Scholar...
The Alpha High Class of 2026
Scholar’s Sources: Where can you find them?
On Friday, I watched my sister graduate as valedictorian of Alpha High School, and I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of anything than being her older sister. Listening to her and the rest of the Class of 2026 reflect on where they’ve been and where they’re going was so moving. Some of these students, my sister among them, have spent a decade at Alpha. These are their stories.
Elle
I’ll let my sister go first, partly because I love bragging about her but partly because she earned it as valedictorian.
In second grade, Elle came home with a family portrait she’d drawn and labeled. Next to me, she wrote smart. Next to herself, she wrote dumb. She was seven. The traditional school she was attending had convinced her that was as good as she was going to get, mostly because she liked talking to her friends more than she liked listening to her teacher explain division.
Then she came to Alpha, where she climbed from the 50th to the 99th percentile. Which is incredible, of course, but more importantly, she stopped writing the word dumb under her own face.
And her achievements are not just academic. By the time she was a senior, Elle had built a mobile app called AskElle, which now has over 70,000 downloads. She has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic. She submitted a paper to Nature and will be the first high school student published there. She runs research alongside professors of anthropology and psychology, and one of their assistants once asked her when her graduate school applications were due, assuming she was a PhD candidate.
Her AlphaX guide, Chloe, says Elle is the only student she has ever met who is equally good at “creating” and “distributing.” The AlphaX program traditionally requires students to post once a day; Elle posted seven times a day. When Chloe asked why, Elle shrugged: “How else am I supposed to know whether there’s a market for my idea?” That kind of comfort with putting yourself and your ideas out there is something I try to embody every day.
She also gives her time away. After a research meeting in which Elle out-jargon-ed Chloe on Zotero citations and data analysis techniques, a freshman walked up and asked Elle if she had thirty minutes to teach her how to grow an audience online. Chloe started to say Elle was too busy. Elle had already said yes.
I could talk all day about my sister, about her incredible achievements, character, and the way she made me cry during her valedictorian speech. If y’all are interested, I can absolutely post her entire speech on the newsletter, but for this week here was my favorite line: “Alpha’s job was never to make us great. It was to unlock what was already there.”
Sloane
I’ve known Sloane for her entire life, and watching her grow up and become such a kind, resilient, intelligent woman had been one of the best experiences of my life. Sloane now has over 2.3 million TikTok followers, and I’m not surprised one bit. Sloane has been writing little plays, filming docudramas, and writing stories for as long as I can remember. She is made for the screen and is truly the best role model for those millions of girls to look up to.
Sloane’s remarkable TikTok account didn’t start with a mission. It started for fun. But early on, when she had a few hundred thousand followers, she found out that one of her young viewers, a twelve-year-old girl, had taken her own life. Sloane has relived that moment in our conversation many times. Her exact words, which Chloe wrote down because she didn’t want to misremember them: “I know I wasn’t responsible for it. But I also know that if I’d known she was watching, I would have posted something very different the day before. And because of that, I have to post something very different every day, forever.”
She has, every day, since. Sloane has spent thousands of hours reading the research on teen girls’ mental health. She built a framework she calls The Coach Method, which teaches girls to talk to themselves the way a good coach would, generous, honest, motivating, rather than the cruel inner monologue most of them inherit by the time they’re twelve. When she shared it online, the video crossed 7 million views and the comments filled up with girls saying it had changed their lives.
To make the method available to anyone who needed it, Sloane learned to code and built an app called MindMail. Tens of thousands of people joined the waitlist within hours of the announcement.
Then, in classic Sloane fashion, she went looking for ways to help the next generation behind her. She pitched VCs, raised $500,000, and started an incubator for young women who already have audiences. Her thesis: too many girls with reach use it to promote other people’s brands and never realize they could be the founders themselves. She has signed three clients so far. One of them, a fifteen-year-old in the UK, launches her own app in a few weeks.
When prospective families tour Alpha, the running joke is that we have to confirm whether they’re there to see the school or to meet Sloane. She always says yes to the hallway conversation, no matter how tired she is.
Maddie
I first met Maddie when she was eight years old, and we bonded over singing duets and learning choreography. That very year, she put together a performance of Wicked at Alpha.
So when she told me she was going to write a musical that brought Gen Z to Broadway, I knew it was something she could do, but even I was blown away by her success.
By senior year, she had written, produced, and directed 355 the Musical, an original show about female spies in Revolutionary War-era New York. It is not a school play. Maddie has logged over 5,000 hours on it: researching the historical record, writing the script and the songs, cold-messaging hundreds of singers and songwriters on TikTok, booking studio sessions, hiring a band, and meeting with Broadway producers and entertainment lawyers. When she started posting clips online, the songs went viral. Her account passed 80,000 followers, millions of likes, and a comment section full of teenagers asking when they could buy tickets.
BroadwayWorld picked her up. A Tony Award-winning club in New York invited her to perform a showcase, which sold out so fast they brought her back for an encore. Her first single is at 170,000 streams on Spotify, with a second on the way. She is regularly in New York and Los Angeles meeting with producers to talk about deal structures.
The part of Maddie’s story I love most is the part where Capitol Records offered her a record deal. Most teenagers would have signed it in the parking lot. Maddie read the terms, ran her own legal analysis, called the lawyers she had retained for her own production company (which she set up as an LLC because she’s a minor and the labor laws in New York are complicated), and turned the deal down. She then explained, in writing, why the terms weren’t in her favor.
Chloe, who used to be a practicing attorney before she became an educator, jokes that she spends more time around lawyers now because of Maddie’s project than she ever did while she was actually a lawyer.
Maddie is also the reason Alpha now has a creative entrepreneurship track. She is the first student to prove that the AlphaX model works for art the same way it works for software.
Alex
Alex may have only joined Alpha in high school, but he fit into the community like he was always supposed to be there.
The first time I met Alex, he was a fourteen-year-old at a passion-project event Alpha hosted for prospective high schoolers. There had already been a babysitting business, a couple of tutoring services, and a clothing brand. Then Alex sat down and talked about Berry: an AI-powered plushie designed to address the youth mental health crisis. He had the research to back it up, could quote the anxiety and depression statistics for Gen Z, understood the insecurity loop, and had thoughts on how AI would reshape the toy industry.
Chloe asked him the standard follow-up: make the goal measurable. Most students at that stage say something like “reach a few thousand kids.” Alex said he wanted Berry on every teenager’s bed in the United States and across the world. He was admitted the following week on a full merit scholarship.
What I have learned about Alex since is that the ambition is the easy part. The work ethic is the rare part. Our AlphaX program requires every student to keep a research document called a BrainLift. The four-year goal is 25,000 words at an A grade. Alex hit it in month two. The funnier part of the story: corporations outside Alpha use the same software to score BrainLifts, and one day Alex’s document broke it. Tech support told us they had never, anywhere, seen a BrainLift that long. The tool literally could not process the volume of research he had put into it.
Alex was also unwilling to use his age as a crutch. He refused to pitch at teen-only pitch nights. He applied to pitch alongside adult founders at Capital Factory in Austin, got selected, and apparently did so well that the president of Capital Factory told us future Alpha students would have to go last because Alex’s pitch made the adult ones look bad.
He has now raised $100,000 in total funding for Berry from investors including Cactus Capital, 1517 Fund, and Hume AI, and his most recent valuation came in at $15 million. He is sixteen.
The best Alex story, though, is the lawyer story. He was working with a lawyer on a privacy policy. The moment Alex mentioned his age, the lawyer dismissed him as a high school project. Alex didn’t argue. He went home, read every privacy policy he could find from AI companies serving minors, taught himself the relevant law, and walked into his second meeting with a different lawyer who was so impressed he couldn’t dismiss him if he tried.
The thing about watching this class graduate is that they don’t talk about high school like it was a holding pen. They talk about it like it was the place that gave them permission to try. Maddie’s musical, Sloane’s app, Alex’s plushie, Elle’s research, none of them came from a curriculum. They came from a school that gave them their time back to do the work that was actually valuable and impactful for them.
I’ll close with Elle’s last line on Friday, which I have not been able to stop thinking about: “Most people spend their lives shaped by the world they inherited. Alpha taught us that the world is something you shape back. Alpha doesn’t change the world. We do. This school’s only real product is sitting in this room.”
Thanks for reading. Go crush the week! See y’all on Sunday.
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