Adam Crappel Jr. has hundreds of stories about children, but there is one he can’t tell without pausing. A few years ago, in a Head Start classroom, a little girl — 4 or 5 years old — who had never spoken a word at school walked up to him while he was demonstrating one of his interactive boards and touched his head. Then she spoke. Her first words in that classroom, ever. She hasn’t stopped talking since.

“I’m a big kid at heart,” Crappel said. It might be the truest line in his biography, and his biography has some competition.

From government housing to a company of his own

Crappel grew up in government housing in South Louisiana, a member of the United Houma Nation, and graduated from high school at 16. He never went to college. What he had instead was an instinct for how things worked, an unshakable faith in God and a belief in himself that outlasted every naysayer. In 1977, at a time when banks weren’t exactly lining up to fund a young Native American entrepreneur in Morgan City, he found one that believed in him and provided him with a loan. From that, A&E Office Machines was born. On his first day in business, he bought his mother a house.

The early years revealed the pattern that would define the next five decades: Take what exists and make it better. Engineering firms were paying $1,000 apiece for calculators that couldn’t compute a square root. Crappel modified them himself, adding square root and pi keys, and charged $20 for the upgrade. He never advertised. He never had to. Word of mouth built A&E then, and word of mouth builds it now.

That tinkerer’s instinct never left. Crappel became the nation’s top-selling dealer of Sharp interactive boards and addressed 500 dealers at the company’s conference. Eventually, he designed his own: the A&E Touch, an interactive flat panel he said is faster, clearer and more responsive than anything the big national brands offer. When early educational apps required clunky handheld toggle controllers, he reworked the firmware of an ad box so children could simply touch the screen instead. He was designing for little hands before most of the industry realized little hands were the point.

The ideas have never stopped coming or stayed confined to classrooms. In January 2025, Crappel launched an entirely separate venture, Crawbabies of Louisiana Inc., which makes flushable and biodegradable baby wipes and biodegradable bath wipes, sold under the playful promise to “keep those tails fresh and clean!” The leap from interactive boards to baby wipes surprises no one who knows him. Crappel is an inventor at his core, the kind of entrepreneur who sees a problem in the morning and is sketching the solution by lunch. Nearly 50 years in, he still wakes up with new ideas and, more often than not, acts on them.

Finding family in Head Start

Crappel was introduced to Head Start in 2016, when Dr. William Holt invited him to a community action conference in Baton Rouge. Crappel set up his board alongside competitors and did what he always does — started playing. Before long, 30 children were crowded around him. The competitors’ booths were quiet. His never was.

“Head Start just fell into place,” he said. Nearly a decade later, AE Touch Technologies serves programs in 18 states and Puerto Rico. Five states — Texas, Oklahoma, Michigan, Louisiana and Alabama — include school district partnerships, but the heart of the business is Head Start. He is a major sponsor of the Region IV conference, and a single delivered board has more than once turned into 10. Large programs have placed orders totaling more than 200 boards. In 2022, the growth landed AE Touch on the Inc. 5000 list, and in 2025 the North Carolina Community Action Association honored him — the same North Carolina programs, he laughs, that kept trying to feed him and invite him into their homes.

Ask him what makes Head Start different from K-12, and he doesn’t talk about procurement. He talks about the kids. “They’re fearless,” he said. Children who are 3 and 4 years old — many from families with the least access to technology at home — run his boards better than their teachers do within days. He has watched children write their letters for the first time on an A&E Touch, and he’s adamant about the difference between passive screen time and a screen a child is learning on.

Service as a calling

Crappel’s competitors sell hardware. He and his 14-person team deliver, install and train every educator at no charge, back each board with a five-year parts and three-year labor warranty, and answer calls within 24 hours. Crappel says, “Head Start has been one of my moves. I love helping people and my company is committed to helping them.” When Head Start directors have an issue or problem, they know they can rely on Crappel and his staff to help them troubleshoot.

When funding cycles are tight, he phases installations site by site as grants allow. Sometimes he simply donates. “Head Start is like family,” he said, and he means it in the accounting sense, too: He is convinced his small Louisiana company has given back more than corporations many times its size.

That family extends to his own payroll. Crappel is a fierce advocate for his staff. He is quick to credit them by name and known to fight for his people the way he fights for his customers. Those who work alongside him also know he can’t go long without a laugh. He is a self-professed jokester who works a punchline into nearly every demo, and he keeps a favorite at the ready: “Never fall in love with a pastry chef. They will dessert you.”

He isn’t finished. Knowing that many Head Start teachers work without certification or college degrees, Crappel is building ready-made, age-appropriate lesson plans into his AE Teaching Tools platform. This will be his next gift to the educators he calls the real heroes. He also has a few inventions he will be taking to market in the next year. Nearly 50 years after he added a pi key to a calculator, Adam Crappel Jr. is still doing the same thing: taking what teachers have and quietly making it more powerful.

And somewhere in a classroom, another child is about to walk up to the big kid at the front of the room and find her voice.

Curious to learn more about AE Touch Technologies. Visit them here.