Craig Gehring – People to Watch 2015

When Craig Gehring made perfect scores on the ACT and SAT while a junior at Baton Rouge Magnet High School, the calls started coming in. “Parents were calling the receptionist [at the school] trying to book me. It was like they were treating [her] as my tutoring receptionist,” he says.

Gehring found his calling training students to earn their best scores on standardized tests.

He started MasteryPrep, which provides prep materials and tutoring, at the Louisiana Tech Park more than a year ago. Now he’s ready to take it into schools nationwide, implementing sales teams in more than a dozen states. And they’re thinking big, with proposals in the works for public school systems in places such as Detroit and Chicago.

“Our sole focus is schools and school districts—to have our teachers onsite in those schools,” he says.

Gehring knows that perfect scores are rare, so the focus is incremental improvements—those extra points needed to gain scholarships like Louisiana’s Taylor Opportunity Program for Students.

“We work with a lot of students who are going to be first-generation college students, a lot who are not able to meet the minimum threshold,” he says. “They need someone to roll up the sleeves with them.” masteryworks.org

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