When walking into the Learning Cube Academy, the vibrant colors catch your eyes. Surrounded by drawings from kids and class pictures, the atmosphere is comforting and ideal for learning.
Learning Cube Academy (LCA) is a private preschool run by Veena Kashyap and Chaitra Giridhara.
Both have substantial teaching experience.
Teaching runs in Giridhara’s family. Her father was an English professor at University of Mysore in India and her mother established a school in his name. Giridhara volunteered in the school before attending university and eventually worked at a bank. After moving to the United States, Giridhara returned to teaching, starting as a volunteer and later becoming a substitute teacher for about seven years.
With around 35 years of teaching experience, Kashyap began teaching English and math while in university. After working in customer service, Kashyap returned to teaching and taught students of all ages, from preschool to middle school. Kashyap had previous experience owning academic institutes, including a preschool in India and a learning center.
“I was very clear, I wanted to do something,” Kashyap says. “But this time I wanted to do it with a partner, otherwise I wouldn’t have even ventured into this. So, because I had explored and I always wanted to do something, I was always looking for an opportunity.”
Kashyap approached Giridhara with the idea of opening a preschool together. With encouragement from their families, they decided to go for it. After buying a location in March 2019, the school underwent around eight months of renovations. Finally, LCA opened its doors in January 2020.
Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Kashyap and Giridhara had to scrap their plan and start fresh. They moved their students online and recorded videos to teach the students remotely. They were able to teach students from all over the world, from India to Amsterdam. As the pandemic went on, they were able to bring enrichment, math, English and even art into their curriculum.
LCA finished the 2023-24 school year with 56 students and had 46 at this year’s summer camp. They will begin the 2024-2025 academic year with 25 students, which can grow as enrollment is year-round.
LCA maintained the curriculum they developed during their early years online, transporting everything in person. LCA values adaptability and works with each child’s unique requirements. They don’t operate as a strict facility, rather they take the best practices, philosophies and methodologies to teach their students.
“A lot of things are learning through playing,” Giridhara says. “We have manipulators for everything and we have enough options for them to learn. Some kids might be visual learners, some kids might be just auditory. We train teachers that way so that teachers can figure out in the first one or two weeks how the child learns, because not every child is the same. The teachers are very loving. Once [teachers] build trust through love and care, kids get very comfortable once they know that they’re safe here and they’re happy.”
“Our core values are three R’s: respect, responsibility and relationship,” Kashyap says. “We respect each other no matter what their age is and we treat them as individuals, not based on their age. We are responsible for what we teach and we are responsible for what [students] are doing. We teach that it is OK to make a mistake and learn through it. Then, we value relationships; that community with individuals, with teachers. That is something that is our core value. We really value that and that is how we stand out.”
Both Kashyap and Giridhara learned more than just how to educate through LCA: they learned people management and applied it to their everyday lives. But most importantly, they were able to take part in starting children’s’ learning journey, having a major impact on their growth,
“Being a part of [the students’] life and [seeing] how they transformed from the beginning of the year to the end was amazing for me to see,” Giridhara says. “They grow up so much both emotionally and they learn a lot. They’re like two or three years old, but the way they transform is totally different, which kind of made me stay in the field and not deviate. I think that’s the reason I never went back to any other different job.”
Learning Cube Academy is located at 3425 Ashington Lane.
