About Shannon Penrose
Partner & CEO of Growing Brilliant, Creator of Raising Unstoppable, Creator of the Bridge Project, Board Member, Advisor, & Speaker.
Shannon is an education leader at heart. She builds programs, products, and organizations that close the gap between child development research and what families actually get. Today, she leads the nation’s leading live virtual preschool from Huntington Beach, California, serving children and families across the country.
Building Early Learning From The Ground Up
Shannon Penrose has a genuine conviction that the developmental window between ages 2 and 18 decides everything that follows. For her, building early learning programs is not a career. It is a mission grounded in three decades of evidence from inside American education.
Working across classrooms, districts, publishers, nonprofits, and startups, Shannon has sharpened her craft at every level of the system. She understands the gap between what the research says about child development and what parents, educators, and institutions actually do inside that window. Her work focuses on closing that gap with programs that are practical, research-backed, and built to scale. Her approach is not about building products for children. It is about building the three capacities inside every child that make them impossible to stop.
Advising Companies & Founders
Shannon Penrose serves as a strategic counselor to education companies, EdTech founders, and institutional leaders navigating category creation, multi-channel growth, and exit positioning. Her advisory work draws on three decades of operating experience across D2C, B2C, and B2B, giving her a rare view of how education businesses actually scale in the real world.
Drawing on her deep experience across early childhood, K12, higher education, and educator workforce markets, Shannon crafts strategies that align mission with market. Each recommendation is tailored to the specific channel, audience, and growth stage her partners are in, ensuring the business case and the educational outcome are designed together. Her advisory clients and partners have included Age of Learning, Learning Wrap-Ups, Brass Media, Orange County Department of Education, and Saddleback Valley Unified School District.
Shannon Penrose's Story
Shannon Penrose began her career inside a classroom as a bilingual educator in Hacienda La Puente, California, and spent two decades serving inside Hacienda La Puente and Newport-Mesa Unified School Districts. That classroom grounding shaped the way she has approached every role since. She earned her M.S.Ed. in Literacy, Numeracy, and Administration from California State University, Fullerton, along with her National Board Certification and her Reading Specialist credential for PK-12.
From there she moved across every commercial channel American education offers. She led product development at Lakeshore Learning, professional development at Discovery Communications, publishing at Teacher Created Materials, regional strategy at Frog Street, and a nine-figure literacy portfolio at Learning Ally, where she earned the 2023 Tech & Learning Award for Effective Brain-Based Literacy Instruction. She went on to lead educational solutions at American College of Education and commercial strategy at Eduscape before stepping in as Partner & CEO of Growing Brilliant, where she is scaling live virtual preschool into a national platform and leading The Bridge Project to reach the 350,000 children hospitalized every year with zero mandated developmental support.
