Art is a teacher, coach, designer, and advocate for student agency and large scale school redesign. Over twenty years ago, Art broke the mold on traditional instruction and content-based pedagogy by moving to a completely student driven, standards based, and project based learning environment. Art’s students built full-size Conestoga wagons, Spanish Galleon ships, life-size adobe houses out of clay, twenty foot canoes to simulate the Lewis and Clark experience, designed games of life size RISK around the American Revolution, and engaged in authentic archeological digs at antebellum homes around the midwest. Those experiences, working hand in hand with students in a community based framework, only galvanized Art's belief that students should be treated as equals, experiences should always be relevant, and that the infrastructure insulating student learning must be redesigned around the concepts of access (equitable) and opportunity (infinite).

In 2015, Art led the complete redesign of Liberty Academy for the Liberty Public School District and created the reverse internship design challenge (UnSchool Challenge) model that was the fore-runner for many large scale programming shifts around the Kansas City area centered on client connected project work, career based exploration, and regional industry based partnership. Currently, Liberty Academy is one of the only schools in the country that is ready for a world of freelance learning and massive shifts in personalization, resource allocation, and skill acquisition. In 2019 Liberty Academy won the national Magna award for innovative school design and was named one of the top alternative schools in the country by Forbes magazine.

In addition to his work at Liberty Academy, Art facilitates coaching for teachers and principals and helps schools all over the country with their redesign process. Art helped the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation launch their Real World Learning initiative in 2019 and has also served as a consultant and designer to the RWL effort. He helped design the conceptual framework for Junior Achievement's Youth Learning Lab and Innovation Center that opened in the Kansas City area in 2020 and has also been a consultant with Big Picture Learning. Art was the keynote speaker at the Missouri Alternative Education Conference in 2021 with a focus on re-assigning value and intentional design in 21st century alternative learning systems. He's in his 24th year of high school coaching for the Liberty Public School District as well, where he serves as the head coach of both the men’s soccer and tennis programs at Liberty North High School.  Art lives in Liberty, Missouri, with his wife of 22 years and their three children; 20, 18, and 12. He loves being outside, trying things in school that have never been done, helping kids find value in themselves, and the lost art of great conversation.