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City Awards Grants to Learning Egg, Potential Development
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -– Learning Egg LLC plans to add 32 full-time jobs over the next three years through a $514,750 expansion that city officials will provide $100,000 to help finance. The city’s Board of Control approved the performance grant, through the Youngstown Initiative program, at Thursday’s meeting.
The board also approved a Youngstown Initiative performance grant not to exceed $73,150 to Potential Development Program Inc. to help fund its $365,750 renovation of the former Anthem building on Market Street into a high school serving students with autism.
The school is projected to create 30 jobs over the next three years. It opened Sept. 23.
Learning Egg, an educational software company, recently relocated from 20 Federal Place to the Youngstown Business Incubator. Its Lightning Grader product allows educators to scan and grade papers utilizing a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet. The grant funds will be used primarily for software upgrades and improvements, as well as a small amount for marketing, said Tom DeAngelo, city economic development coordinator.
“They’re expecting great things from this,” he remarked.
“Many schools are looking for innovative ways to measure student progress and provide timely feedback. The challenge is finding assessment solutions that are flexible, affordable and easy to use,” remarked Elijah Stambaugh, Learning Egg’s founder and CEO, and a former math teacher. “When we show our comprehensive solution to educators, they see the value and therefore receive our product as something that can really make a difference in their lives, which in turn helps them adapt instruction to increase student achievement.”
So far, hundreds of individual teachers and more than 100 schools have signed up as paying users of Lightning Grader, Stambaugh reports. Demand is being driven by changes in education such as adoption of the Common Core standards.
“These new evaluation systems make educators -- teachers and principals -- provide evidence of student growth,” Stambaugh said. “Lightning Grader makes that process more efficient by allowing the educator to collect student data in a variety of ways on paper or on any web-enabled device.”
Stambaugh praised YBI as “a great resource” for his company. “Not only do they have an extensive network but the people who work here, the staff, understand business and what businesses need,” he said.
“Knowing that there are not rigid lease terms helps our business focus on creating new business and not on managing a landlord.” The incubator is “creative” in planning for companies’ space needs “so I’m sure that we can grow here for quite some time,” Stambaugh added.
Appearing before the Youngstown Initiative committee at an April meeting, YBI's CEO, Jim Cossler, told committee members that Learning Egg was among the highest-potential startups he has seen since YBI shifted its focus to software and technology development 12 years ago, and the incubator put $44,000 in cash into the company. He predicted that like YBI anchor Turning Technologies, it would break out nationally and internationally.
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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