Meet Damian Creamer. His LinkedIn profile lists him as a "courageous innovator" and "future-ready leader," and if nothing else, he seems to have mastered the innovation of becoming a future-ready profiteer in the charter biz.
Creamer graduated from Brigham Young with a BA in Spanish back in 1995. There's a six-year gap in his LinkedIn CV, but in 2001 he landed on a pair of big ideas, launching Primavera Online School and Strongmind (which for some of us may have unfortunate echoes of classic Homestar Runner).
Primavera is the cyber charter; Strongmind is the company that provides the actual education stuff. Primavera, owned by Creamer, collects that tuition payments for the students, then pays Strongmind, owned by Creamer (who is apparently the only shareholder), to provide the instructional programs. This is what we call a "related party transaction," and Arizona is a wild west playground for such shenanigans. A 2017 report from the Grand Canyon Institute found that 77% of Arizona's charter schools operate with related party transactions. It's supposed to be "efficient" and if your goal is to efficiently enrich the folks running these operations, well, then, sure. Maybe you imagine guys like Creamer having tough negotiation sessions with himself ("I'm not going to buy this service from me unless I can offer myself a 20% cut in costs").
A decade after launching his con-joined business children, Creamer did go back to school to the Thunderbird School of Global Management (ASU) and Harvard Business School Executive Education.
Grand Canyon Institute gave Creamer his own report last year, explaining just how complicated this self-enrichment shell game can become.
Damian Creamer. an entrepreneur, oversees and profits from multiple entities, Primavera online charter school, a.k.a. American Virtual LLC, and operates under the for profit Management Group American Virtual, LLC, StrongMind, the software entity that he contracts with, and Verona Learning Partnership which was built on the nonprofit assets built by Primavera and now has Valor Preparatory Academy charter school under its umbrella. StrongMind even has another LLC in the Philippines.
Creamer also gets to play educational expert. Here he is opining about "learning science" with some great argle bargle like
At the heart of this is StrongMind Intelligence, a foundational infrastructure layer that Creamer and his team are developing to enable learning systems to operate in accordance with learning science. “StrongMind Intelligence is not a feature. It is not a chatbot,” he explains. “It is the intelligence layer that models the learner continuously and supports real-time adaptation.”
Or this glowing interview on IdeaMensch with the "visionary education entrepreneur" prasising how "His work is grounded in the belief that autonomy, competence, and connection are essential psychological nutrients for learning, and that technology—when designed ethically and intentionally—can amplify, not replace, human impact."
In several interviews Creamer talks about how he makes all important decisions by 2 PM. He is just an action guy-- this next bit turns up in more than one Creamer interview:
Ideas are easy. Execution is everything. I bring ideas to life by pressure-testing them early and grounding them in purpose. If an idea doesn’t clearly improve learning, empower people, or move the mission forward, it doesn’t make the cut. Once the “why” is solid, I focus on the simplest possible version that can create real momentum. From there, it’s about getting the right people in the room—product, engineering, UI/UX, learning, marketing, operations—and creating shared ownership. The best ideas get better when they’re challenged.
I like to move quickly, but not recklessly. I believe in shipping, learning, and iterating. Progress beats perfection every time. We launch, we listen, we adjust and we keep moving.
He is just loaded with tech bro bromides. He likes to stay "ruthless about priorities and intentional about focus." He stays productive "when I'm in flow and designing my environment to support it." His early career failure? "Not trusting myself to make decisions." He screwed up by listening to other people. He likes to listen to Joe Rogan.
And he's right there with the AI revolution. ChatGPT is his "thinking partner," and he's counting on agentic AI to help keep his learning software focused and adaptive. There is so much more, although none of it is about the actual nuts and bolts of education. Which is a real choice, given that cyber charters perform so poorly that even charter fans like the Fordham Institution scold them.
The nuts and bolts of making money, however, are well addressed by Creamer. According to a 2025 report from Grand Canyon Institute by Dave Wells and Curtis Cardine. Some of their findings are stunning.
Arizona charter schools get a whopping 85% to 95% of the funding that brick and mortar charters get, and yet cyber charters, including the Arizona variety, get much worse results than brick and mortar schools. Primavera was great at hanging onto money; by 2015, they had accumulated over $45 million in assets.
At the same time, Primavera was spending millions on curriculum, software and support purchased from Strongmind. Creamer has been passing a lot of money between his left and right hands.
Transitioning from non-profit to for-profit involved all sorts of new entities that appear to be simply Creamer putting on a variety of party masks. In the meantime, Grand Canyon computes that Creamer accumulated over $75 million in profits.
Meanwhile, the investigative team with Craig Harris at 12News found other ways that Creamer has been raking in the money. They found that 78% of all taxpayer dollars that went to Primavera went to "management." Meanwhile, there's a big fat "stockholder equity fund" with around $10 million parked in it-- that fund benefits "exactly one person: Damian Creamer." Since 2017, 12News computes that Cramer has paid himself $24 million. He did, however, managed to give some hefty gifts to Congressman Andy Biggs and State Senate President Warren Peterson, who have been vocal defenders of Primavera.
But, hey-- if Creamer can actually deliver on all his talk about brilliantly leading to awesome conclusions, maybe he's worth all that money. So, is Primavera accomplishing great educational achievements with its students?
No. No, it is not.
Primavera is in the news these days because State Superintendent Tom Horne just rescued Creamer from the Arizona State Charter Board, which was about to shut Primavera down based on three straight years of a D grade. Creamer started laying folks off in anticipation of the impending charter revocation. Not that Creamer didn't have a Plan B-- Primavera can just switch to a private school and cash in on Arzona's taxpayer-funded school voucher program. They'll even give out free laptops, and no state tests to take, either!
The state board started the process of shutting Primavera down in March of 2025, and they were just about there when Creamer got Horne to back his "administrative error" argument. Which said that the school should have been judged as an "alternative school" rather than a "traditional" one. The school had been rated as an alternative school for many (but not all) years since the designation was created in 2012. Creamer says he made a mistake and didn't catch it because he was busy caring for his wife, and also COVID.
I am wondering why Arizona has different standards for "alternative schools." Arizona defines such schools as those that "serve specific populations of at-risk students" or a student who "is unable to profit from a traditional school setting" and I guess the idea here is that alternative schools are expected to fail, so we'll lower the bar for them so that their failure is less obvious on paper. But if alternative schools are designed to create success in ways that traditional schools don't, that seems different than just saying "this is a school for students who probably won't succeed."
"We have the students who are already in academic trouble" is the common refrain of cyber charters, and it's a legitimate observation (though arguably less so since COVID drove some traditionally successful students into cyber settings), but that's the business you're in, so shouldn't you be better at it? Primavera has been at this for twenty-five years-- shouldn't they have figured out how to do better than the same failure rate that a traditional public school would experience with these students? Especially as I am led to believe, by cyber charter teachers who would rather not go on the record, that cybers work hard to cook the books for that special smell of success.
Oh well. Horne has retroactively declared Primavera an alternative school for the years its performance was subpar, and now that same performance is hunky dory. The state charter board is pissed, but Creamer is still rich and well-connected. Just another day in Arizona.
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