 |
Peter LePort - Our Founder
Dr. Peter LePort is a general surgeon in private practice in Orange County, California. He is the President and managing director at Lite Dimensions, where he oversees both medical and business operations.
Dr. LePort received his M.D. degree and surgical training in Brooklyn, New York at Downstate Medical College, where he was an Assistant Professor of Surgery for two years prior to moving to California. He is a member of the Faculty of the American College of Surgeons, the Orange County Surgical Society, and the American Society of Bariatric Surgeons.
Dr. LePort first became interested in childhood education while in medical school, over thirty years ago. As a result of his interest, he discovered and began studying the ideas of Dr. Maria Montessori. He was intrigued by Montessori’s unique approach to developing the cognitive and moral needs of the individual child.
Years later, when his own young children were ready for preschool, Dr. LePort chose to educate them on the basis of Montessori principles. He sent them to the best Montessori schools in the area, trying several of the course of a few years. While his observations of his children’s experience confirmed his earlier appreciation of the Montessori method, he found most schools to be poorly managed. Often, administrators failed to hold themselves accountable to high standards, and teachers were regularly demoralized by a lack of support and guidance. Dr. LePort’s experiences managing his own business made him acutely sensitive to the ways in which poor administrators can undercut the expertise of motivated specialists—whether doctors or teachers.
As his older child approached fifth grade, Dr. LePort became increasingly dissatisfied with the schooling his children were receiving. Most of the local Montessori schools did not extend into the upper grades, and those that did failed to stress the academic rigor and conceptual thinking skills he wanted for his children. Dr. LePort turned to traditional private schools, and was again disappointed with what he found. Some schools focused primarily on social conformity, others politicized learning, others stressed rote memorization at the expense of understanding, and yet others pushed “creativity” at the expense of learning actual content. The biggest problem was that schools either did not teach knowledge, or taught it as blind dogma—they did not teach an evidence-based approach to knowledge.
Not satisfied with any of his alternatives, Dr. LePort decided to hire a teacher to homeschool his children, and helped her develop an innovative, new upper elementary program. Both of Dr. LePort’s children went on to finish that homeschool program, and are now in PhD programs at top California universities.
Dr. LePort had been thinking about the field of education for decades; he had been involved in the process of educating his kids from start to finish; and he had the business acumen to see that most schools were very shoddily managed. Starting a school seemed like the next logical step. He began to envision a brand new approach to teaching children, an approach that would draw together the best aspects of Montessori and Classical education, taught through an evidence-based, scientific method. This school would hire the absolute best teachers and administrators it could find—and then hold them firmly accountable to high standards as only a private business could.
LePort Schools is the culmination of Dr. LePort's efforts to provide children with a superior education, one in which they develop strong basic skills, master challenging content, and learn to think independently. Dr. LePort's dedicated team of administrators, teachers, and educational experts have worked together for over a decade to develop and deliver an exceptional curriculum in a stimulating, nurturing environment, earning LePort Schools its reputation as a superior place of learning. At five campuses and growing, LePort Schools now caters to over 450 students in Orange County.
In addition to his surgical practice and his schools, Dr. LePort pursues many other personal causes with equal fervor and energy. He is a founding member of Americans for Free Choice in Medicine, a charitable association dedicated to educating the public about the conflict between the right to choose and the alleged right to medical care. The organization promotes individual liberty, personal responsibility, and free-market economics. He is also a Board Member of the Ayn Rand Institute, a charitable organization dedicated to the promotion of Ayn Rand’s novels and ideas. He is also the founder of LePort Education Resource Center, a charitable association with the mission to develop and distribute rational, objective educational resources, and thereby produce a flourishing, knowledge-based society.
|
 |
