Students are still dealing with the long-term impacts of COVID. Atlanta startup QuestRead wants to help.

Janessa Ferrell, Co-founder and CEO of QuestRead, left her career as a school teacher in 2019 to solve the reading proficiency gap. While she was working on solving this problem, the world halted.

The pandemic had a large impact on education and new research from Education Recovery Scorecard found that the average U.S. public school student in grades 3-8 lost the equivalent of a half year of learning math and a quarter of a year in reading.

Ferrell has observed this gap specifically as it relates to learning to read.

”The pandemic had a huge effect on learning. Many of the kids who learned how to read during the time – who are in third grade now – had a mask on their face when they learned, so they never learned how to make those early phonics sounds properly. When you are learning to read, it makes a big difference when you’re looking at someone’s face. Some never got that experience,” Ferrell said.

QuestRead, founded in 2023, aims to close this learning gap by creating an encouraging adventure out of the journey to reading mastery for children at all levels. QuestRead’s approach is very child first, complete with a kid’s advisory board to help innovate, according to Ferrell.

 

Get To Know QuestRead

The mobile reading game is designed to encourage and reward aspiring readers through in-game rewards and real-world prizes.

This unorthodox approach to teaching students how to read began, ironically, in a traditional setting.

”I started out my career as an elementary teacher in the classroom. And I also worked as a reading specialist, working with kids who didn’t have a whole lot of support, who were failing at reading. What worked for those kids was making reading fun by making it into a game and giving them books that they wanted to read. So back into the classroom, I started trying crazy things,” explained Ferrell.

“One time, I even took a boat into my classroom, like a real physical boat. I brought it in and the only time that kids could sit in the boat was when they had a book in their hands. To me it made sense – let’s make the association with reading fun and do something extreme.”

She continued to experiment with nontraditional and “fun” teaching methods and realized the potential to scale the concept through technology to reach other students, especially with lesser opportunity.

“Our mission is that every child, regardless of their zip code, their race, the family they’re born into, has the same opportunity to become a confident and successful reader. That has been our goal from the beginning. There’s a lot of opportunities given to kids who are born into specific families that are not given to others, which can make a huge impact on the rest of their lives. So we created a tool to help everyone have an equal opportunity to be successful,” said Ferrell.

 

What’s Next For The Startup

Earlier this summer, Ferrell brought home the audience choice award at Startup Runway, a popular pitch competition in Atlanta.

Giving this mission a technology platform was a dream that Ferrell and her husband, COO and second of three co-founders, Greg Ferrell, bootstrapped from the beginning. They supported the dream creatively, even AirBnbing their home for a short time.

At the moment, the Ferrells and third co-founder and CTO, Pavel Kozlovsky, plan to stretch their resources before getting external capital and take advantage of the freedom in these early stages.

The team released the iOS version of QuestRead a few months ago and is currently working on building out the Android app to expand their reach. They are looking to grow their user platform and receive feedback to continue its evolution.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jamie Miller graduated from the University of Georgia with bachelor’s degrees in Journalism and Business Management. When she is not writing or working as a Business Consultant at Ernst & Young, she can be found reading a good book (anything from Harry Potter to Brene Brown), sipping an espresso martini at the neighborhood bar or hunting the flower aisle at Trader Joe’s. She aspires to produce diverse and valuable journalism for the world in the hopes that it inspires others to become lifelong learners who seek first to understand, then to be understood. Read her portfolio here