After a Fight for a Permit, Veritas Academy Is Still Standing

From Nairobi to North Branch: Susie Brooks’ Fight to Build Veritas Academy

Contributing writer Fela Jamal profiles Susie Brooks, founder of Veritas Academy, a classical Christian school in North Branch built around international and residential student programs. Brooks traces her path from a traumatic childhood in Nairobi to a career in higher education, and the frustration with how diversity was discussed there that pushed her to start her own school with three students and no money, overcoming a zoning dispute that drew national attention along the way.

By any measure, Susie Brooks did not have a typical childhood. Growing up in Nairobi, Kenya, she reflects on being raised by a mother who had survived a traumatic experience at the hands of a minister connected to a missionary organization. “My mother was raped, and that’s how I came to be,” Brooks says. “I was a product of rape, so I don’t have a father.”

She shared that her mother died when Brooks was six, leading to being placed with a family she describes as unkind. At 17, she struck out on her own, facing years of hardship without money or family support. But she held on to a sense of hope she credits to her mother, a Christian woman who believed things would get better even when others told Brooks she would amount to nothing.

Years later, at 19, Brooks reconnected with a family from the same church as the man who had inflicted harm on her mother. The relationship grew close enough that they helped fund her college education in the Netherlands, her first opportunity to leave Kenya. She thrived there as an international business student, and an exchange program brought her to the University of Akron in Ohio in 1997. An internship eventually took her to Alaska, where she landed a job and later moved to Minnesota to follow a relationship that did not last. She decided to stay in the state anyway, working first in the coffee industry before landing at a Christian university, where she finished a master’s degree and discovered a passion for education.

Working across three universities, Brooks noticed the same pattern: students arriving unprepared for college-level work, forcing schools to spend money on remedial classes for material she believed should have been mastered in K-12. The disconnect pushed her to leave higher education in 2012 and focus on younger students instead. She quickly realized she was not suited to working inside someone else’s system. “If you are a visionary, it’s very hard to go and work under someone else’s vision,” she says, “because you want to fix things, you want to make some changes.”

Around the time her son entered kindergarten, Brooks discovered classical education and became convinced it offered the most complete path to preparing students for leadership. That conviction, paired with her frustration with how diversity was discussed in higher education, led her to found Veritas Academy, a classical Christian school built around international student and residential programs. She says diversity conversations in higher ed rarely felt like an even playing field. “It never felt like we were starting out neutral and we were all the same,” she says. Instead, she felt the message was that others were being granted a seat at a table where white men remained in charge, with the implicit reminder that outsiders would never truly belong.

Brooks started Veritas with three students and no money, relying on private donors to get off the ground. Finding a home for the school proved difficult. After a two-year search, she and her team purchased a building in North Branch, only to have the township deny their permit, citing zoning while, according to Brooks, making comments that suggested the objection was personal rather than legal. She recalls hearing that some in the community had moved to the area specifically to get away from “those” people. After 15 months of delays, Fox News covered the dispute, and the permit was approved within minutes. By then, Veritas had lost prospective families and teachers who had moved on.

Veritas opened in July 2015 with three students, two Kenyan American and one American. It began hosting international students in 2017 and joined an exchange visitor program in 2019, though Brooks pulled back from placing students with host families after overhearing families express regret over taking a child in. That experience led Veritas to acquire a former hospital in Chisago City in 2020 to house international students directly.

The school has grown steadily since, adding a mental health-focused curriculum in 2023, three years ahead of what Brooks says public schools are rolling out this year. Veritas served 61 international students from about 12 countries in the 2024-25 school year, but new visa restrictions have since kept many admitted students from enrolling.

Brooks and her team are now recruiting both international and local students, including from Twin Cities communities, for a residential program open to American students who need a different environment, whether they are struggling academically or dealing with outside pressures. Students can board Sunday through Friday and return home on weekends. Veritas folds extracurricular activities, including basketball and soccer, directly into its core curriculum, and Brooks is planning an agricultural program in partnership with Michael Chaney and Project Sweetie Pie to grow food for students and for sale.

Now in its 11th year, Veritas has sent graduates on to college and hopes to enroll around 50 students this year, with continued growth in its residential program as a goal.

For more information about Veritas Academy, and the enrollment process, visit www.veritasclassical.org/.

Fela Jamal is a contributing writer for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. He welcomes reader responses at jamal.denman@gmail.com.