Jarrod Bolte:
While I was reading to my son at bedtime, just kind of hit me that I wonder if everyone has a bedtime routine. And as I started asking that question, I did learn that there was a lot of people who didn’t. And so, I took it as a design challenge to try to figure out what could we do to help facilitate bedtime routines that would get kids to read each night.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech, High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Jared Bolte. Jared is the CEO of Improving Education, a nonprofit that he founded in 2015. Improving Education focuses on using improvement science to accelerate improvements within the education system.
Jared is also the founder and CEO of Bedtime in a Box, which is what you just heard him talking about. It’s also what we’re talking about for the rest of this episode. Jared is interviewed by Sofia Tannenhaus, director of the CARPE Collaborative at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education. I was there too, and you’ll hear my voice a little bit. I’ll let Sofia tell you more about what Bedtime in the Box is and why we’re so excited about it.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Jared, it is so great to sit down with you today to learn more about Bedtime in a Box and how you have achieved the results you have. But for listeners who aren’t aware yet of the impact you’ve had, I’d love to share with them that, in your first year, you provided boxes to over 600 low income families in Baltimore. And since then, demand for your program has continued to grow. As of today, you’ve delivered more than 50,000 boxes with 80% of those families experiencing poverty.
And these boxes represent over $7 million worth of resources, including more than 225,000 books and 550,000 additional bedtime materials, all going into the homes of families that need them most. And the best part is that this is at no cost to families. So as a mother and a former classroom teacher, what I find most compelling about your data is that it represents an increase in oral language development and improvements in sleeping patterns, which I know all parents appreciate, but that all supports the development of healthy minds and bodies of our children.
So before we jump into it, a couple core improvement metrics that you all have tracked. First, the number of minutes read per week. This has increased from 30 minutes to 105 minutes on average after receiving the box. So that’s a change of nearly 4,000 minutes over a year, which equates to 65 hours and likely over 400,000 more words just in that year.
And then the second core improvement metric that you’ve shared with me is the consistency of bedtime routines. Prior to Bedtime in a Box, about half of the families you worked with had a bedtime routine. Just three months after receiving Bedtime in a Box, 94% of families had a consistent bedtime routine. That is such a huge win, especially for, I know very well how challenging that can be. And so that to me is just so remarkable. So not only has Bedtime in a Box jump-started all of this, but it was embedded in the nightly routine of these households. So I have to ask, let’s just begin with, what is the story behind Bedtime in a Box?

Jarrod Bolte:
It’s kind of crazy to think about all those numbers. When I first came up with the idea, it was really trying to solve a problem of how do we get families to read to their kids more each night? And I was part of some of the early Carnegie work that we were doing in Baltimore around the B10 initiative, and it taught me a lot about how to think about going to the end user to try to solve this problem.
And so a lot of the early ideas for how I approached that was really going and talking to families about are you reading to your kids? And I heard a lot of yeses and a lot of noes, and it’s too difficult and we don’t have the resources, we don’t have the materials. So I think it was probably one night while I was reading to my son at bedtime, it just kind of hit me that I wonder if everyone has a bedtime routine.
And as I started asking that question, I did learn that there was a lot of people who didn’t, they didn’t know how to establish it or the kids kind of ruled what was happening. And so, we took it as a design challenge to try to figure out what could we do to help facilitate bedtime routines that would get kids to read each night. And so slowly through the process of providing materials to families, listening to them about what works, what doesn’t work, thinking about what are the steps of a bedtime routine, the box started to come together and take the form that it is today.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Can you tell me more about the design process?

Jarrod Bolte:
Yeah, it was pretty simple. I think people who know me know that this was not a fast process that I’d probably been talking about this idea for probably two to three years. And I was kind of just going through the learning process. I was the executive director of Teaching and Learning in Baltimore City Public Schools at the time when I first had the idea. And from that, it kind of started with just asking people who were around me, what does your bedtime routine look like?
And at the same time, I was reading Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto and hearing how or thinking about how checklists could reduce issues within the operating room and get better around surgery and all of those effects. And I thought, huh, could we also create checklists for bedtime or checklists for different things within the educational system that could actually help people focus on that?
So it started with just initial conversations and then assembling the first box, or actually it was a bag, and went out to Target bought, I think it was like $27 worth of just materials that I thought would help facilitate bedtime. Put it in a bag, walked across the street because there’s a school right behind the central office.
And then at the end of the day, as kids were leaving and parents were outside picking up their kids, I just started talking to families about their bedtime routines and if they would use these materials. And I got a lot of weird stares, blank stares, like what are you doing? And even some folks who were like, this is not good. It’s just a bag of junk. And so that really was the shock of like, oh gosh, this is not something that we can just do on the fly for it to really take hold, it has to have more structure to it.
It has to be something that they’re seeing that they want to embrace. I also started challenging myself to think about, is there a way that we can also design the box in a way that would excite the kids and not the parents? So I could get the kids to actually bug the parents to do a bedtime routine with them every night. And so as we iterated on that, I messed around with different items, sent it out to families, had them use that, and then would come back about a week later and ask like, hey, what worked. Just kind of big open-ended.
And they told me. So I learned a lot about what the materials should be, what their routines look like, even some things around used materials versus new and learn that there’s a real value proposition to the new materials. And so we learned that really early on around quality and that quality matters and getting something to happen like that. So a lot of back and forth that came with the early design.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
I’m surprised people didn’t want free things from Target, but that’s a side note. I love this design question you had of, how might we get kids to beg their parents for a bedtime routine, and that you went to kids to see, okay, how are these products that we’re choosing landing for them and what might we need to change based on what they’re saying. So you just kept iterating and just kept figuring out?

Jarrod Bolte:
Yeah, it was probably a three-year process from when I first started having conversations with people around me in the central office and other places about the bedtime routine. I actually had a prototype in my office that I’d just show people every once in a while if I could trust them.
It’s weird when you’re creating something, you kind of want to keep it tight, close to the chest, because you think that, okay, is this a good idea or is this just something that’s stupid? Am I just way out there? So I would keep a prototype, and I actually did that for a few years where I would just keep a prototype next to my desk and show people different things. If it would come up in conversation, I would tweak it from time to time, but I never made any moves to actually do anything with it for about three years until my son was just like, hey, Dad, why don’t we actually do that?
And it was at the time that I was transitioning to start my own improvement organization, and really wanted to have some type of first initial improvement ideas out there and some change ideas that we could test. And so we were working in early childhood and this just made sense like, all right, let’s go for it. I think we’ve got a good enough prototype. Let’s put it out there and see what happens.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Okay. So you were doing this as part of your work at Baltimore Public Schools, or was this a side thing that you had going or…?

Jarrod Bolte:
The idea came to me when I was working in the central office and trying to see how we could get kids to come to school ready for kindergarten. So the initial ideas came there. I left the district office probably about six months later after I first started playing around with that, and then went to another literacy based organization. And even through that, I was there for about a year and a half. I was kind of just iterating on this idea. It didn’t fit well into what they were doing. They were more focused on tutoring. But I still kept coming back to this thing of like, huh, can we get kids to read more and parents to read to their kids? So it kind of went through that. But then when I made the decision to go on my own and start an improvement focused organization, that’s when it kind of locked in. Let’s try it out.

Alec Patton:
Jarrod, can you talk us through exactly what’s in the box?

Jarrod Bolte:
It goes around the checklist. So the checklist has five steps. It’s bathing, changing into pajamas, brushing your teeth, reading and saying good night. So it actually started with the process, and I think that’s why it goes back to packaging process. And so within that, it was identifying, okay, what are the things that would be essential for a family to have if we were going to do all those routines?
So on the bathing side, you have bath wash and a bath towel, but then you also have phone letters and numbers that can be used to practice addition and math and number sense, and then letters with spelling and learning letter names and letter sounds. So it’s something like that that we can insert into the step that wouldn’t necessarily be there. So in changing into pajamas, we’ve partnered with a pajama manufacturer who helps us to produce those.
So we have really cool blue pajamas with white stars on it for brushing your teeth. We actually have a toothbrush, toothpaste, and the toothbrush flashes. We have to motivate our kids. And we found that that motivation of that flashing toothbrush really gets kids to want to brush their teeth each night, which actually was a challenge in many households. So those little things like that help to connect it.
There are four books that are in there, all brand new. There is an alarm clock in there that we kind of put in like, huh. I think it’d be interesting to see if we could actually get kids to own their bedtime. Not only their bedtime routine, but the time that they go to bed and even the time that they wake up. And every time, hey, in this world of tariffs, sourcing some of these materials is really difficult.
I’ve tried for a while to remove the alarm clock, but our families keep coming back. Like, no, you cannot remove that. It is helping our kids tell time, learn numbers, learn all of that. And then the final thing there is a stuffed animal that we put in there too. It is an elephant. And when we do formal presentations, we tell this little story about the elephant never forgets, so you have to also help remember and to do the bedtime routine every night.
And then there also, we did partner with a group called Teach My, who was written up by the Chicago Tribune a couple of years ago as the number one home learning kit that was designed specifically for parents. So I included that in there after I started trying to design it myself as an educator, as someone who worked in curriculum and instruction, but figured out really quickly that’s not my skillset, that they had already done it.
And so we worked with them to tweak some things and include that within each one of the boxes. So we do have four level boxes, an infant, toddler, preschool, kindergarten, so we can provide them at different ages that also have some nuances of those materials for those different ages.

Alec Patton:
So it’s a bedtime plus home learning box.

Jarrod Bolte:
Pretty much. Yeah, it has that extra component because the first iterations just had the bedtime components, and then I started getting questions, is there something you could provide to families that would also give them things that they could do in the home to help learn some of the other skills just beyond getting them to read each night. And so that kind of popped up.
It’s funny, the way we got connected with them is that I ended up, we were just bootstrapping this thing. So I was going online, going to Amazon, trying to find these things and would buy 20 or 50 boxes at a time. And I do that over a period of time. And it’s one point the CEO of the company just called me, like, what are you doing? And I told her and she was like, oh my gosh, can we just partner with you? Can we work with you? So yeah, we’ve been able to develop relationships with different providers.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Yeah. And you mentioned your son, Ben in passing, but I do want to ask, what role would you say he played in Bedtime in a Box as it evolved?

Jarrod Bolte:
Yeah, he was pretty big, but he was the one who kind of pushed it all. It was based off of his bedtime routine, and I think from the very beginning, even as I was iterating on it, he really liked the idea. And he was probably about four at the time, four or five. He was going into kindergarten when I was initially thinking about it. So my whole world was kind of in that space.
And then as I left to start my own organization and then started putting it together, he was part of some of the early trials and getting it together, and he was actually one of the early distributions. We started with 20 boxes at one of the, it was a Judy Center, which is kind of a center that supports a catchment area of families around the school that are really focused on the early childhood piece. So we had provided 25 boxes there, and immediately the families reacted. People were on their phones looking at it like, oh my gosh, they’re giving us all of this stuff. And didn’t even think about our bedtime routine.
So we did a couple distributions, and then probably about two months after we had done those distributions, Ben was diagnosed with leukemia. Going through all of this design work, him being a part of it. Then all of a sudden we were kind of thrust into the healthcare space.
I had been seeing a lot of work and learning about how healthcare improvement connects to the educational work we were trying to do. And so I basically was in the midst of all of that as he was beginning to go through treatment and going through that treatment over the next year and a half. So Ben played a really critical role even through that process where in times that he couldn’t go to school because of his treatment or he just wasn’t healthy enough to go, we would pack boxes and put them together for kids.
So it was something that we did together kind of as a bonding thing. And it also solidified that, yeah, this is the right thing to be doing at this time. And it kept him also focused on something else about giving back, even at a time, he was going through a lot with his treatment.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Yeah, I would imagine he felt some degree of empowerment to be doing something so meaningful to support other families.

Jarrod Bolte:
He did. He really did. And I think that was something that motivated me to just keep doing that part of it. Even as I was starting to set up networks and work on other literacy initiatives and things across Baltimore, it was something that we could kind of circle around. And that he also felt really good in doing.
Him being in the hospital too also gave me insight into how bedtime routines could be that constant in a place of chaos. So even when he was going through treatment, you’re getting medications at all time of night. And he had a pretty consistent bedtime routine, and only one parent could stay at night. So I was the parent designated to sleep overnight in the hospital. And so we kind of created our own bedtime routine during that time that kind of fit into what those structures were within the hospital, which he needed to adjust to.
But it also taught me a lot about the improvement side of things in hospitals and how you package process. So I also saw how even in healthcare, they had created all of these different packages. So everything from an access kit that they would use to access a port, or it was the same if I was at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore or if I was at Stanford in California, which we ended up having to go to one time when we were out in California together. But it was the exact same package that existed in those places. So they had created these things to create consistency.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Totally. Can you share more about what it’s like to do an improvement project with a four-year-old?

Jarrod Bolte:
I think it was almost the validation to go out and try it. So while he was involved with some of it was still like, yeah, I was still iterating on it and he would support with the packing and everything else.
He also, he would write his lists of books that he thought needed to be in the box the kids would like. So it actually got me to think a lot about,
How do we approach the books that are in the box? How do we standardize what that is? So his ideas around the books actually solidified around what ended up being those texts. It’s really kind of focused on texts that we wanted every child to have the experience reading. So they are books that are probably your more traditional books at that age. They’re also kind of durable. Everything’s new, but it allowed for us to put and plant stories in the households so that everyone could have that same common language and common interactions, so that when they did come to school, those kinds of base understandings were there.
So we’ve tweaked the books a little bit over time, but we’ve kind of landed on a good set of those books. But yeah, I mean I think it was the motivation. He was the one who was like, just do it. Why don’t we just do it, keep doing it. I think he’s also the one who’s pushing like, Hey, why don’t we just go on Shark Tank? And as a non-profit, you can’t really go on Shark Tank and get an investment. But he kept pushing at that. Even at the time is when I was getting a lot of people saying, no, we don’t want to fund that. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s confusing. We got a lot of noes upfront, but he kind of pushed me to keep going at it.

Alec Patton:
What are the top Bedtime in a Box books?

Jarrod Bolte:
The top ones, they’re your basic things. There’s some books by Sandra Boynton, there’s the Going to Bed book. There’s some things that allow for rhyming, even your standard ones like Good Night Moon, Snowy Day, those types of things. Because we actually saw that those books weren’t necessarily in some of our households, especially low income, but those were the books that all of our kids who were in higher income, middle income families had read. So we wanted to start there, make sure that we could provide those types of books in the household so that they all had those common experiences.

Alec Patton:
What’s your favorite?

Jarrod Bolte:
This one isn’t in the box, but I think the one is What So You Do With An Idea? Because it follows the pathway that we actually took in creating the box. And it tells about the boy who has an idea and thinks it’s a great idea, and tries to do some things around that.
And as he starts to show it to others, kind of gets pushed down a little bit and brought to reality. And so he pulls it back and keeps it to himself and lets it go create investor inside. And then at the end ends up seeing that his idea, once he lets it go, goes everywhere. And at the end it says, what do you do with an idea? You change the world.
And so I think that’s that narrative. I didn’t realize it entirely at the time, but that’s also a book… We used to give Ben a book every year at the first day of school. And so in his first day of kindergarten, we gave him that book, what do you do with an idea? And literally now we’re trying to change the world with Bedtime in a Box.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Yeah. Let’s talk about changing the world, because I’ve been wanting to ask you about sustainability of this. And if you think about your 50,000 boxes that I shared at the beginning of this, and then you multiply that by 365 days in a year, that is about 18 million bedtimes. If the routine is sustained for a year, and I know as you expand, your goal has started to focus on a billion bedtimes by 2030. How are you thinking about that? What’s your approach to that?

Jarrod Bolte:
Literally, there’s not a whole lot of strategy behind it. It is like, set the big target and let’s figure out how to do it. We know, what we’ve learned over this time is that even though we got a lot of noes at the beginning and a lot of people not figuring out how it would fit, if it’s fundable, if it’s something that we could actually raise money around, what we’ve noticed was that once we give it to a family, it’s something that can immediately change what’s happening in the household that night.
And the people who we’ve worked with in school districts or Head Start programs or early child care centers, or just pre-K programs or school districts, they’ve also seen that, where they can provide that and the families immediately can make a change. So we’ve actually grown organically. We’ve not done any marketing, we’ve spent no dollars on marketing. We’ve not done anything. This has actually just scaled word of mouth.
So we went from, like you said, 600, I think it was actually 75 in the first month, which I consider my first year, and then 525 in the next full calendar year to doing a little over 10,000 all through just requests. So people just call us up, hey, I heard about this. Could we get these boxes?
So most of the way it works is that school districts or other organizations are reaching out to us and then they’re coming with funds to be able to purchase those, and then we can provide them to them. But our stipulation is that it has to go to the family at no cost to them. So in some cases, we’ve started to raise some money.
I moved from Baltimore to Denver in 2019, and we started working in the area distributing a few boxes, and then all of a sudden people learned about it and started engaging with us in the same type of way. And then at one point we distributed boxes to a school here, and the old principal who now worked in Texas learned about it. He was up here on a visit and then came back to Texas and started telling his team just outside of Houston about what we were doing, and then also the local foundation. And then pretty soon we got a call with like, hey, could we get about 2,500 boxes to Texas to try out? And so a new relationship developed.
So it’s really been just growing organically through word of mouth and new connections and everything. We’ve also noticed that once we can provide or donate boxes to try it out in a location, usually the next year it starts getting built into a budget and they’re purchasing those boxes and we can provide them tenfold back to those districts in the future. So that’s kind of how it’s grown.
We’ve had to work a lot also on supply chain. We have a 26,000 square foot warehouse in Baltimore, which started in my basement. It grew to a smaller warehouse and then a big shared warehouse where we actually worked with a bunch of other organizations and established a shared warehouse. And now we have this big 26,000 square foot warehouse and have figured out supply chains, manufacturing. We have partnerships with people who manufacture pajamas with the publishers around the books.
So we can actually source all those materials at about half the price that it would be in retail, and then be able to turn around and provide that savings back to the school districts or programs and all of that. So it actually is a win-win across the board because of the size and volume that we’re doing.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
It’s size, volume, and then relationships, it seems like. Right? I mean, that’s a huge thing too. And going to relationships. I was just thinking if I was a family receiving this box, that means that somebody has seen me and said, hey, you deserve this. And then I would imagine that they feel seen and valued. I mean, isn’t that what we want all families in schools to feel?

Jarrod Bolte:
Yeah, absolutely. And this was something that early on as I was trying to figure out what’s the form this should take? And it started with a bag and then quickly figured out like, huh, could we just put this in a box, and also design it in a way where the box could actually live on inside the home and be like a place to keep your bedtime supplies, turn into a bookshelf, or keep all of your books.
The thing that I didn’t realize in some of the early stages too, is kind of the concept of a box and how that’s also seen as really a gift. Most of our gifts come in a box, and one of the questions from one of the early foundations who denied us funding was, you can’t just walk in and give someone something like that. How are they going to take it? Are they going to receive it?
And it was a good question. I really was like, wow. Yeah, I don’t know. I’m just hoping they would take it and use it if we designed it appropriately. But what we did learn is that if we could create ownership in the box from the very beginning, also with the kids wanting to do it, and we could present it in a way that was really high quality and do it in a way that engaged the family. It wasn’t just a handout. It was actually a, hey, we believe in you and we believe you deserve this. We believe you deserve all of these new materials. We want you to have them. We want you to embed it in your household and your nightly routine that it would be better accepted.
And truly, that’s what we’ve heard from families is that they truly see it as something that they then can make their own by that giving of that box, of that gift. But it quickly, I mean, so it’s something that I didn’t realize at the time, but I think it has evolved into that as we’ve been doing more and more of it and hearing from families.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Just to recap some takeaways I’m hearing is one, the power of empowering others with a change idea to make their own. And then you were also building off of existing routines or structures, so it was easy to sustain. You provided all the material so it wasn’t just like a concept, it was something that they could do immediately. You had a focus on quality.
You didn’t want to just give people a bag of crap. You wanted it to be a high quality thing that they would value and want to use. And just the scalability of this really strikes me too. There was no infrastructure that they needed, no knowledge about any kind of routine. It was just something that they could start doing.

Jarrod Bolte:
When we started distributing them, I used to do a little presentation around bedtime, why it’s important and all of that. And then we would also train others to do that. It wasn’t much, because we realized that you can overdo it and parents just can’t dealing with so much. We need to do it in a very simple way and also make it intuitive. And that’s why the checklist and kind of the really simple instructions were there for them.
But we have done more and more, we’ve kind of crafted a presentation that we can give or that we can train others to give when they provide these to families, that actually quickly gives them the information about why it’s so important, what you can do with this kind of unboxing the box as well, and going through the routine, the materials and all of that so that it becomes really meaningful and useful immediately within that household.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Based on your learnings, what would you tell someone who has an idea but maybe feels like the system is too big or complex to embrace it?

Jarrod Bolte:
Scope it down to what you think are the key pieces and the key elements, because if you design something too complex, the uptake becomes very, very difficult. You can learn the complexity by starting small and trying to figure out what are the right pieces, but really it’s just a matter of trying it.
And I think back, and I kind of wish I would’ve done it sooner. I wish I would’ve taken the leap and started putting it out there a little more, little faster, because it ended up turning into a pretty good idea. But I didn’t know that, and I was really hesitant. I was a little afraid of failing.
I think that’s sometimes what us is, that you don’t want to have that big failure. So you can start small and learn your way into it, but there is a point in time where you just have to commit and say, I’m going to commit to doing this, and trying to figure it out. And even through the different failures, I could have stopped right after I took it across the street and got a pretty bad response.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
You got rejected, but you kept going.

Jarrod Bolte:
But you have to take those little things as learnings because none of your ideas come out fully fleshed when you are trying to figure them out from the beginning.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
And you learn a lot from failure.

Jarrod Bolte:
Oh, yeah.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
We always tell our networks that is, failure can be such a great learning tool. So I’m curious what your biggest challenges were and what you did to overcome them.

Jarrod Bolte:
Yeah. The biggest challenges early on were funding. I mean, we knew that parents wanted it and that they responded to it even from the first few distributions. So that solidified to me that there’s something here, and it’s worth iterating on.
But to get larger organizations, foundations to believe in an idea that hasn’t been proven is a tricky one. And so that early on was the challenge. And so we oriented, I mean, we’re a nonprofit organization. Improving education is kind of our umbrella organization. And we do work running networks. We support school districts and running their own networks. We do things like Bedtime in a Box, and we also have a learning box that was created during the pandemic by 10 teachers. It’s a whole other story, but has the same type of pathway on it. But yeah, that part of funding was the most difficult.
But what we started realizing was that there were individuals out there who were willing school districts and centers who were willing to pay for that to provide it to their families. And so we just kind of had to orient toward that as the source. And then early on, we actually created a model where we would reinvest anything that we made on top of the actual material costs back into the organization.
So we were able to create a revenue stream that helped to fund the next set of boxes and continue to build the organization. So as volume increased, we kept cycling it back and really kind of built that entirely from the ground on up.

Alec Patton:
I have a question because Sofia said that you could feel really seen by getting a box, and I think that’s definitely true. You could also feel really judged. And so I’m curious about if that is something that you encounter with some people where they’re like, you don’t think I read to my kid, you don’t think I know how to do bedtime?

Jarrod Bolte:
Yeah. We tried to remove that stereotype because we actually, we’ve partnered with organizations. We stayed away from trying to give individuals or try to sort out, who are the people who need the box, and we thought about it more as a universal, universal distribution, a universal program. So it helped to remove that connotation with it, where it just became where we would work with a Head start program or a duty center all across the state in Maryland, and everyone who they worked with got a box.
So that was part of the thing. As we began to expand this, we would not just provide two boxes or three boxes here to target those families who really needed to improve, but actually gave it to everyone.
The thing that we actually learned, we collect a lot of survey data on this. We haven’t done any big evaluations or anything else, but we have learned through a lot of that survey data that also helps us to keep iterating and thinking about new ways of putting this out.
Even some of the more affluent families who received one just because their kids were part of it, although they had a bedtime routine and they were reading to their kids each night, and it was pretty consistent. The box then just enhanced what they were doing. And we heard all kinds of stories around like, huh, I never thought about learning in the tub. So they were also adding some things to their own bedtime routine.
So I don’t think it’s a, oh, it’s a have and have not type of situation. It’s actually something that because of how it can be distributed universally, and also because it can be connected to their own routines and enhance them, it actually is something that kind of lifts everyone up.

Alec Patton:
That’s awesome.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
How would you say this impacts your work at improving education?

Jarrod Bolte:
It gives me some practical, really, really practical work and problem solving that we have to do on a daily basis. Improvement came a lot from business, and we run a multimillion dollar pack and ship organization as an arm of our nonprofit. So we have to get really good at efficiencies and process and routine on that side of things and supply chain and everything.
So while we’re doing work in schools and working on processes for teaching and that, I also get to learn a lot about the processes for manufacturing and how do we go about that. Which I think has actually enhanced how I approach some of the way we do our work on the education side with our partners in Baltimore and then also in Denver, where we’re working pretty extensively with them. I think a lot about improvement even in schools as process. And so how do we put those processes in place?
And I think Bedtime in a Box has enhanced my thinking around that and has gotten me to also get very practical on those sides when we’re working with school districts or when we’re running our own networks, we’ve actually created lots and lots of routines and processes that can be replicated within the Head Start structures and other things when we working on kindergarten readiness with those individuals.

Sofía Tannenhaus:
Thank you so much, Jared. You’ve motivated me to read What To Do With An Idea tonight with my daughter, but this has been really wonderful to hear. I love hearing more about your challenges and how you’ve overcome that. And the beautiful thing about how you’ve articulated your story is just always focused on keeping students and families at the center and adapting it based on what they saw as valuable. So I think the whole story is really beautiful, and I’m super in your corner with this 2030 goal, so however I can help, I’m here for it. Thank you so much, and I look forward to the next one.

Jarrod Bolte:
Yeah, thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Alec Patton:
High Tech, High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Sofia Tannenhaus and Jared Bolte for this conversation. Thanks for listening.