Dear families,

We started Virtualis because we could not find the school we wanted for our own children. That is the short version. The longer version is about what we were looking for, what we did not find, and what we decided to build.

What we were looking for

We were looking for a classical school. A real one, in the tradition of Augustine and Aquinas and Newman, not a school with “classical” in the name and some Latin on the wall. We wanted the Great Books, Latin from the Grammar stage, Socratic discussion, a serious mathematics program, and a faculty that understood the difference between training a student to think and training a student to score.

We were looking for a Christian school. Not a school that was religious in decoration only, but a school where the Catholic intellectual tradition was the air the students breathed. Where prayer was part of the day, where Scripture was taken seriously, where virtue was not a slogan but a discipline, and where the faculty believed — with their lives, not just their curriculum — that every child is made in the image of God.

And we were looking for a school that would give us back the afternoons. We wanted a rigorous academic day in the morning and the whole rest of the day for family, sports, music, service, chores, rest, and the things that form a whole child. We did not want a nine-hour school day that left no time for the other half of formation.

What we did not find

We found schools that were one or two of these things. We did not find a school that was all three, near us, that our family could afford, and that would still exist in ten years. So we decided to build it. We joined forces with Great Hearts Online, the classical-school network we already admired, and we built a school around their curriculum, their faculty, and their live-class schedule — with our own layer of Christian formation, medical and health formation through Vitae Health, and direct partnership with families in our own communities.

What we built

Virtualis is a Christian classical academy that delivers Great Hearts Online’s curriculum to families in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Utah. Students attend live Socratic classes from roughly 8:00 in the morning to a little after noon. The afternoon belongs to the family. We add Catholic formation, parent partnership, Vitae Health’s body-and-soul curriculum, and direct access to our founders for any family that wants it.

We are small. We intend to stay small for a long time. We would rather know every family by name and serve them well than grow fast and serve them badly. If you are looking for a glossy marketing brochure, we are not the school for you. If you are looking for a school that will tell you honestly what it can and cannot offer and then work hard to do what it promised, we might be.

What we hope for your student

We hope your student will learn to read a serious book slowly. We hope she will learn Latin, and sit up straighter for having learned it. We hope she will memorize poems and say them aloud. We hope she will learn to write a paragraph that says what she means. We hope she will stand up in front of a class one day and defend a thesis she has worked on for two years. We hope she will love the good, desire the true, and recognize the beautiful when she sees it.

We hope, most of all, that she will know herself as a child of God and will carry that knowledge into whatever vocation she is called to — marriage, religious life, medicine, the trades, scholarship, the arts, the military, the Church. A classical education is not a career track. It is a preparation for a whole life. We take the whole life seriously.

How to reach us

We answer our own emails. If you want to talk about whether Virtualis is right for your family, write to us through the request-information form, and one of us will write back. Not a team member, not an automated reply. Us.

Thank you for reading. We are grateful you are here.

— Zeus and Dr. Dana Rodriguez