About us
Learn about our mission, vision, and the values that drive our excellence.
about our organization
Kestrel
“Kestrel is an online school based in Denver, Colorado, teaching students across the United States and in more than thirty countries. We run small live sections and self-paced courses in AP and honors subjects, SAT and ACT preparation, college application writing, and academic English for international applicants. Live sections cap at sixteen students, every course is taught by a licensed teacher or a subject specialist rather than a rotating pool of tutors, and every recording, transcript and worked solution stays in your library for a full year. Sections run in three time zone bands, so a student in Seoul or Sao Paulo is never asked to sit a calculus class at three in the morning.”
Total Students
0
Empowering learners globally through accessible and interactive education.
Valuable Instructors
7
Expert-led instruction from industry professionals and experienced educators.
Total Courses
14+
A diverse range of comprehensive courses designed for skill mastery and growth.
Who we are
Kestrel opened in the fall of 2025 in a rented studio above a bike shop in Denver, with nine students and a whiteboard that squeaked. The premise was narrow and a little stubborn: a student in Pueblo, or in Penang, should be able to sit in the same class as a student in Palo Alto, taught by the same teacher, on the same day, at a price a normal family can plan around. A year on we teach students in forty one states and thirty two countries, most of them on a laptop at a kitchen table. The name is the small falcon that hangs motionless over a Colorado field, watching, sometimes for a full minute, before it moves at all. It seemed like a reasonable thing to name a school after.
How our classes work
We do not treat covering the syllabus as success. Every unit closes with a graded check, every written response is marked by the teacher who taught that unit rather than by a pool of graders, and any topic a student misses comes back as a separate review session. A unit is not finished until the student can actually do it. That is slower than racing to the last chapter, and it is the reason our AP pass rates have risen every year we have measured them.
Our teachers
Every instructor at Kestrel holds a graduate degree or a state teaching license in the subject they teach, and every one of them spent at least five years in a real classroom before ever facing a camera. Four of them read for the College Board. We do not hire presenters. The person explaining a topic on video is someone who has watched hundreds of students get that same topic wrong, and knows exactly where the confusion starts.
Students from anywhere
About a third of our students log in from outside the United States, from Seoul, Shanghai, Istanbul, Lagos, Sao Paulo and Warsaw. Live sections run in three time zone bands so nobody is asked to learn calculus at three in the morning, the site reads in four languages besides English, and our academic English track exists because a strong physics student who cannot yet write a US style lab report has a writing problem, not a physics problem.
Where we are going
We want a Kestrel student in every US state and in a hundred countries by 2030, and we want the price to stay somewhere a family can plan around without first having a conversation about whether it is worth it. Good teaching is not the property of a handful of zip codes, and we intend to keep proving that one section at a time.
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