About Our Team | Tradewinds School

Tradewinds School is built by educators, designers, and leaders who understand what gifted learners need—and what too many schools fail to provide. Our team brings three decades of combined experience in gifted education, school leadership, product design, and psychology. We're not building a traditional school with a gifted track. We're building a school designed from the ground up for the minds that think differently.

Carl Sabatino

Head of School

Carl is a nationally recognized leader in differentiated education and school design. He served as Head of School for Bridges Academy in Studio City, California—starting in a dentist's office—and grew it into an institution known for rigorous, personalized instruction that meets gifted learners where they are. Under his leadership, Bridges expanded to a second campus in Seattle and became a model for how schools can maintain intellectual rigor while personalizing the learning experience.

At Tradewinds, Carl brings expertise in curriculum design, teacher development, and creating school cultures where gifted students thrive socially and intellectually. He understands the specific challenges that come with educating bright, intense learners—the asynchronous development, the social complexity, the need for intellectual peers—and has built schools that address them directly. His vision is clear: gifted learners deserve schools built for them, not retrofitted around them.

Andy Szybalski

Co-founder / Board Member

Andy is a product designer and AI entrepreneur who has built world-class digital experiences. At Google, he led the design of Google Street View. At Uber, he shaped the product and design for Uber Eats.

He founded Tradewinds after watching his own highly gifted 7-year-old navigate Hawaiʻi's schools. Watching his son's intellectual hunger be stifled in one-size-fits-all classrooms, sparked a conviction: if we design products carefully for millions of users, shouldn't we design education carefully for the children we claim to serve? Andy holds a BS and MS from Stanford University in Computer Science and Art, and brings that intersection of technical depth and design thinking to how Tradewinds approaches instruction and technology. He sees Tradewinds as the hardest and most important design problem he's ever worked on.

Dr. Heidi Meck

Co-founder / Board Member

Heidi is a clinical psychologist with over 20 years of clinical experience, licensed in both California and Hawaiʻi. She brings her expertise in social-emotional development to the gifted learners of Tradewinds. She deeply understands the asynchronicity, perfectionism, intensity, and anxieties that can accompany a gifted mind.

Throughout her career, Heidi has worked with children, adolescents, and adults navigating eating disorders, anxiety, depression, and body image issues. She understands how crucial the school environment is when it comes to supporting the specific vulnerabilities of gifted learners. At Tradewinds, Heidi ensures that intellectual rigor is paired with genuine social-emotional support—not the generic "wellness" language that most schools default to, but a real understanding of what children need to thrive.

Leigh Fitzgerald

Board Member

Leigh is the CEO of Learn Hubs at Learnlife, an organization dedicated to reimagining how children and adults learn. She has spent her career in education innovation and school leadership across multiple contexts: as a school and district leader in Hawaiʻi, as a school leadership coach, and as a program manager at Stanford University's d.School and Arizona State University.

Leigh brings grounded expertise in how schools actually operate—the gap between vision and implementation, the real constraints schools face, the decisions that matter. She has worked extensively with schools exploring project-based learning, student agency, and how to design learning experiences that engage the whole child. Her perspective ensures that Tradewinds' educational vision is not just intellectually compelling, but operationally executable.