Our Story · Longview, TX
Why Amanda started Premier Dental Academy
Most dental assisting schools you will find online are one location of many, run from somewhere else. This one is not. Premier Dental Academy of Longview is a single school on Gilmer Road, and the person who owns it sat in the same classroom you are thinking about sitting in.
She took this course before she owned it
Amanda Williams is the owner and director here, and she is a Registered Dental Assistant. Before either of those things was true, she was a student in this program — the same twelve weeks, the same room, the same nerves on the first morning.
From there she went to work chairside in an East Texas dental office. Not a lab, not a simulation. A real practice with real patients and a schedule that does not wait for you to catch up.
Later she was asked whether she wanted to take the school over, and she bought it. As she puts it in her note on our About page: not handed anything, just a regular person who went through this program and made it work.
The gap she is still annoyed about
Ask her what the first day chairside was actually like and the answer is not about teeth. Her words: the hardest part of the first day isn't the dentistry — it's the software, the charting, the insurance, and the rhythm of a real practice that no classroom ever taught her.
“Every graduate walks into their first office already fluent — because I lived the gap, and I'm not about to send my students into it.”
That is a specific complaint, and it is the reason this school exists in its current form. A program can teach you what a tooth chart is and still leave you frozen on a Monday morning when a real one is open in front of you, the doctor is calling out findings, and the next patient is already in the waiting room.
So she built the missing part
Rather than hand students a generic online course and hope, this school built its own practice-management and clinical trainers from scratch. Practice Pro is the front-desk and business side — the schedule, the ledger, insurance claims and EOBs, recall, reports. ChairSide is the clinical side — the patient banner, SmartDoc clinical notes, the perio summary.
Inside those you will find the things students freeze on in real offices: an anatomical tooth chart, a six-point AAP perio chart, a prescription pad with an allergy guard that turns red when the drug and the allergy do not agree, a drag-and-drop schedule, and the ADA claims and EOB workflow. You can open the free previews right now, before you ever apply.
Both are free to try and neither is a video. You click the thing, and if you click the wrong thing, you find out — which is the entire point.
The previews are open to the public — no account, no email, no sales call. If the software side is the part you are worried about, that worry is testable tonight.
What she believes, and what it changes
Three ideas run this place. They sound like slogans until you notice each one costs something — which is how you tell a real value from a tagline. Tap each one to see what it actually changes about your twelve weeks.
Why the class is capped at eight
Eight seats is not a marketing number, it is a consequence. If every student is going to chart, hold instruments, set a tray and run a workflow in front of someone who can correct them, there is a hard ceiling on how many people can be in the room. Past that, somebody is watching instead of doing, and the person watching is the one who struggles in their first job.
It also means there is nowhere to hide, which is uncomfortable for about a week and then becomes the reason people finish. More on that in what a class of eight actually feels like.
Local on purpose
This school knows the offices in Longview, Tyler, Marshall and Kilgore because it is in Longview, not because a corporate partnerships team sent an email. When we point an office toward a graduate, that is a person putting her own name on it in a town where she still has to run into everybody at the grocery store.
That is also the honest limit of it. We are one school in one place. We are not going to tell you we are the biggest, or the only, or that a certificate from us is the same thing as your state registration — it is not, and we wrote a whole post explaining the difference. What we will tell you is who teaches here and where to find her.
How to check any of this yourself
Do not take a website's word for a school — ours included. Come stand in the room. Tours are free, there is no pitch, and you can ask whatever you want, including the awkward questions about money and job prospects. The campus is at 2800 Gilmer Rd, Suite 106 in Longview, and the phone rings to the school: (903) 913-6444.
If you would rather see the curriculum first, the classes page lays out the program and the upcoming start dates, and the tuition planner shows exactly what a payment schedule looks like — the same math the checkout uses, no sales call required.
Come meet the person who runs it
Free campus tour on Gilmer Road in Longview. See the room, try the trainers, ask the hard questions. Applying is free too.
Apply now →Keep reading: What happens at a campus tour · Why we cap classes at 8 students · Why we built our own school software