Bulldog Manufacturing is a student-run light manufacturing company inside Alden High School 60 miles south by southwest of Rochester, New York. It is a real shop with real tools, real deadlines, and real customers, where teenagers do CAD and design, quoting and invoicing, marketing and sales, production planning, quality control, and shipping, with money and reputation on the line. Max Marzec and Lydia Wrest are two members of Bulldog’s leadership team, and they are my guests today. Max is Bulldog’s CEO, so he’s carrying operations and customer accountability in ways that will feel familiar to anyone who has ever had to deliver on a promise. Lydia is Bulldog’s design director, living in that space where creativity meets constraints, where an idea has to become a thing that works and then become a thing that ships. They’re also full time high school students, which means they are constantly crossing a border between two worlds: the traditional classroom and a purpose driven environment where the work does not care about your seat time, but about your choices you make, minute to minute.

Here’s what’s coming, listeners. We’re going to start by dropping you into Bulldog Manufacturing on a busy day, a walk through the sights, sounds, and smells, the rhythm of a team moving with purpose, and the little decisions that make a shop either feel alive or feel like school pretending to be work. Then we’ll get specific about quality, what it means in their world, how they decide something is truly ready to ship, and what happens when the team splits on whether “good enough” is actually good enough. From there we’ll take on a transition most schools never name out loud: the switch from school mode to Bulldog mode. Picture them walking out of chemistry and then heading into customer driven work with real stakes. What changes in your body and brain as you make that switch? What do you start noticing that a typical class does not ask you to notice? We’ll go into leadership too, not titles, the moments when standards slip, a deadline gets missed, someone’s feelings are on the line, and you have to choose between being liked and being honest, and we’ll ask what principles Max and Lydia are trying to live by so Bulldog does not become school with a boss. We’ll also zoom in on each of them as individuals. With Max, whose family speaks both Polish and English, we’ll use his resume as an artifact, including the QR codes that link to websites he has built, and we’ll go deep on how an internship at a law office shaped the way he thinks about the path forward. With Lydia, we’ll talk about what it means to be trusted with real tools, real standards, and real consequences, and about moments when that trust became real through a decision, a mistake, or a standard she had to defend. We’ll talk about Lydia’s school trip to Italy and how it shaped the way she sees buildings now that she wants to become an architect, and we’ll also bring AI into Bulldog Manufacturing, where it can genuinely improve the work and where it introduces risk. And we’ll close by honoring the giants. Lydia will reflect on the trade lines in her family and what they taught her about real learning. Max will shout out Mr. Allen Turton and name one concrete way he wants to pay Allen’s coaching, guidance and mentorship forward to the next generation. Our audio engineer is the talented Evan Kurohara. Our theme music is provided by the master pianist, Michael Sloan. If you have insights or comments about this episode, email me at joshreppunproductions@gmail.com.

Peter Gray, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College, wrote the following in the Washington Post. “I began to look at research, which showed and documented that beginning as early as the 1960s until now, there has been a continuous, gradual but huge increase in anxiety, depression, and, most tragically, suicide among school-aged children and teens. Over that period of time, children have also been less and less free to do the things that make them happy and build the kind of character traits — of confidence, of internal locus of control, of agency — that allow them to feel like ‘the world is not too scary, because I can handle what life throws at me.’ This kind of attitude requires independent activity to develop, and we have been offering less and less of that activity.”

Peter Gray’s powerful words are the perfect way to introduce today’s conversation with Pam Moran and Ira David Socol, two educators who have spent their careers pushing on a simple idea that feels obvious once you say it out loud: school should help young people find their voice, build real agency, and guide them as they learn how to influence their world and shape their futures.

Pam led Albemarle County Public Schools in Virginia from 2006 to 2018, a long run in superintendent years, and she was named Virginia Superintendent of the Year by the Virginia Association of School Superintendents.

Ira has lived an unusually wide-angle life in service, including work in New York City public safety and decades in public education as a technology and innovation leader, with a deep focus on Universal Design for Learning and environments that work for every kid.

Together, they have written and edited books that refuse to treat school as a neutral machine. In Timeless Learning, with co author Chad Ratliff, they argue that we should stop mistaking “great teaching” for learning, and instead redesign learning experiences so kids have choices, purpose, and time to do work that matters. In Designed to Fail, Ira makes the tougher claim; a lot of what we call school was built to sort, to rank, and to protect comfort for adults and advantage for some kids.

And in their newest book, an edited volume titled Real Learning, Real Accomplishment: Schools that Work for Kids, Pam and Ira gather stories from educators across the country who are moving from compliance to mastery, not by chasing one more initiative, but by changing the ecosystem, the expectations, the schedules, the spaces, the assessment, and the relationships that shape what kids actually experience.

So that is where we are headed. We are going to talk about student voice as more than a slogan. We are going to talk about what it means to trust kids, and what it costs when we do not. And we are going to keep pulling the conversation back to the practical question that sits under everything they do: How do we design and create systems of learning that put the learning in the hands of the young learners, with the adults on the side as coaches, mentors, guides and sponsors? One of the answers you will hear in the next hour is that we adults must, must, must do this design and development with the learners. We must treat them as co-creators and co-designers. Truly, we must Just Say Yes.

If you have thoughts or insights on this episode email me at joshreppunproductions@gmail.com. Our audio engineer is the talented Evan Kurohara. Our theme music is provided by the master pianist, Michael Sloan.

Courtney Joly-Lowdermilk is the founder and lead consultant of the Massachusetts based LLC, Bridge Educational Engineering, where she partners with schools, towns, and organizations to design cultures of belonging that strengthen engagement, performance, and retention. Her career sits at the intersection of education, disability access, and mental health—spanning classroom teaching, student support, and a decade leading college mental-health education. She helped design and build NITEO, a structured leave-and-return pathway for young adults navigating disability and mental-health challenges, and she’s authored practical guidance that makes pausing—and coming back—more humane. She’s partnered with more than 100 teams to shift programs, practices, and policies toward dignity and access. We begin by exploring where Courtney’s energy comes from, meaning that time during elementary school selling popcorn at her grandmother’s bingo hall, or later learning to read a room, and carrying that “be useful” through-line into a career built around people. From there, we head into the deep end: what it actually takes to make belonging operational. Courtney shares the design moves she’s seen turn compliance culture into places where people risk honesty, ask for help, and feel at home. Then we get into the radical idea hiding in plain sight: interruption. What happens when a young person needs to pause—and how do we build the return so it doesn’t become a cliff? Courtney draws from her work with leave-and-reentry pathways to name what makes a pause feel heavy versus what makes it a bridge back. In the second half, Courtney joins us as one of the featured voices in Ted Dintersmith’s new documentary, Multiple Choice. We talk about that simple sign on her office wall—“Work Hard And Be Nice To People”—and the not-so-simple question beneath it: how do families support ambition without becoming “college pushers” or shrinking a kid’s world into a single story of success? We widen the lens to a culture that’s drifted from “fix the schools” to “fix the kids,” and Courtney brings her REACH framework to the role confusion at the center of it. We even dip into the AI urgency narrative—what ticking-clock stories do to teen nervous systems—and what healthier, more human adult moves look like. We close with David Yeager’s 10 to 25 and the mentor mindset—high standards, high support—plus moments that reveal who Courtney is off the page: motherhood, a suitcase note that reads “good luck mommy,” and a shout-out that brings us back to her roots. It’s a conversation about agency, dignity, and designing the conditions for thriving. As always, this show is edited by the very talented Evan Kurohara.