At
first glance it’s easy to mistake a place like
Norfolk Christian Schools as the educational equivalent
of a megachurch. Like those showy and upbeat houses
of worship that draw thousands on Sundays, Norfolk Christian
is big and getting bigger fast.
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The
schools’ leaders run an almost perpetual fundraising
and building campaign. They have spent $15.5 million
in the past five years to renovate and expand its schools,
adding new classrooms, a gym, library and science labs,
and more money and more building projects are on the
way. And, they’re packing them in: Student enrollment
has jumped from 595 to 790 over the past three years
and is expected to top 900 this fall.
The similarities end there, however. Unlike the megachurches,
Nor-folk Christian isn’t growing just to gather
more souls. Getting bigger, says Headmaster David Patterson,
is part of its formula for offering a private, biblically
based education at an affordable price to families dissatisfied
with public school offerings. “Right now we’re
looking to grow to the 1,100-student mark, and that
threshold will help us to keep the tuition down and
yet be able to pay our teachers better salaries,”
he says.
The demand at independent evangelical Christian schools
is evident in Virginia and across the country. Greenbrier
Christian Academy in Chesapeake has added 75 students
in the past year, a more than 10 percent leap. Fredericksburg
Christian Schools’ enrollment topped 1,150 students
on five different campuses this year. And Williamsburg
Christian Academy, slated to move into a new 64,000-square-foot
building in late winter, expects to double its student
population from 250 to 500 within the next few years.
These fast-growing Christian schools are different from
elite, secular private schools or even the more established
mainstream church-affiliated schools, which often tout
fancier campuses or large endowments. Despite their
expanding enrollment, independent Christian schools
have to stretch every dollar.
“A
lot of these Christian schools are just making it,”
says David Sikkink, an assistant professor of sociology
at the University of Notre Dame, who has studied the
growth of private religious education. “We have
to pinch every penny,” says Gary Foss, founder
of Fredericksburg Christian Schools, an evangelical
nondenominational school marking its 25th year.
Among evangelical schools in Virginia tuition usually
ranges from $4,100 to $6,900 for high school students,
less for the lower grades. Financial aid is often available
and most schools have an annual fund to help pay operating
costs. Greenbrier Christian Academy, for example, raises
about $200,000 each year to cover expenses beyond what
tuition pays for. A few schools have small endowments.
New construction is paid for through fundraising campaigns
from students’ families and community supporters.
Teachers, in fact, typically shoulder the burden of
a shoestring operation with low salaries. Williamsburg
Christian Academy pays an average of just $22,000 a
year, about half the $41,000 average paid to a Virginia
public school teacher. Interim Principal Gwen Martin
admits that the sum is paltry, but “our teachers
are here because they feel called to ministry and because
they want to have an impact,” she says.
Norfolk Christian provides a slightly better salary
structure, paying its teachers an average of $27,000
a year. Patterson hopes his growth plan over the next
few years will allow him to bring those salaries up
to $32,000 a year. In addition, he’s putting more
money into staff development, increasing the budget
from $8,000 to $50,000 per year. “We feel like
that has already made a huge impact on the quality of
our instruction,” he says.
That same focus on the mission over the money is reflected
in the design and building at new or expanding schools.
For their project Williamsburg Christian leaders turned
to a Utah-based design firm that specializes in Christian-school
construction. The firm, Daniel Cook and Associates,
has a strategy dubbed “Building God’s Way.”
It touts simple, rectangular buildings, gymnasiums and
cafeterias placed in the center of the building to negate
the need for tall exterior walls; no-frills detailing
and negotiated alliances with major manufacturers for
discounted pricing. The result: schools typically save
30 percent to 50 percent over traditional construction
costs, says Mike McIntosh, the firm’s director
of operations.
Fredericksburg Christian just completed a new elementary
school in Stafford County that has room for 300 students.
The building cost about $3 million, and while not designed
by the Utah firm, it reflects the same approach. The
cream-colored building has a neat but simple exterior
of metal and cinderblock, and a flat roof. “We’re
very plain Jane,” says Foss. “We think they
represent well, but we try to stretch our dollars just
as far as we possibly can.”
While the private evangelical schools have a different
approach to construction, they increasingly are embracing
more traditional academics. Like their fundamentalist
forebears that dominated the Christian school boom of
the 1970s and early 1980s, these schools place a significant
emphasis on a Christ-centric worldview. But students
also read non-Christian, even atheist, writers and take
instruction in real-world ethics and world religion
studies and have the opportunity to sign up for Advanced
Placement courses. And the schools’ building programs
have as much to do with adding state-of-the-art computer
and science laboratories and fine arts and athletic
facilities as with adding classroom space.
“Parents used to send their students to Christian
schools because of the lack of prayer in the public
schools, for moral issues, if you will, and if you didn’t
have the best labs or the best fine arts facilities,
that really was not their concern,” says Ron White,
Superintendent of Greenbrier Christian Academy. “People
still want the moral training, the character training,
but today you hear people coming in and saying, ‘What’s
your average SAT score? How many of your graduates are
going on to college? Where are they going to college?’
There’s much more emphasis on the academic side
of it.”
The attention to academics also helped propel the rising
popularity of a unique private school concept called
the Christian Classical School, which teaches grammar,
dialectic (logic) and rhetoric. There are five such
schools in Virginia, including the Faith Christian School
in Roanoke, a six-year-old middle and high school that
has seen so much demand that it will open a grammar
school this fall and break ground on a new $5.5 million
school building within the next year.
Faith Christian — which expects to have an enrollment
of 110 students this fall — teaches, among other
things, Latin, principles of interpretation and classical
literature. By the 12th grade, students are required
to read “Beowulf,” the complete works of
Homer and books by Karl Marx, Adam Smith and Descartes.
The school’s six graduates from last year all
got into the colleges of their choice — including
the College of William and Mary, Wake Forest University,
and Furman University — and earned $180,000 in
merit scholarship money.
“There are those who say you have to be either
a rigorous academic environment or a Christian school
— you cannot be both,” says Samuel P. Cox,
headmaster of Faith Christian. “And we vehemently
disagree with that. You can be an Evangelical Christian
school that believes in the Bible and believes in what
Christ has taught, and you can still be just as good
as any school around, academically.”
Sikkink notes that key factors in this trend are the
upward mobility of the average evangelical churchgoer
over the past 30 years and the fact that the evangelical
movement has effectively used modern styles of worship
and modern music to draw a more professional demographic.
“In some ways, Christian schools are just now
catching up to this new reality,” he says.
Others point to the fact that Christian parents are
increasingly disillusioned with public schools. “What
we hear consistently from parents in deciding to enroll
at our school is that their kids can’t learn in
the public school because of the large classes and the
lack of discipline,” says White. In fact, Christian
schools do market themselves as having an edge in personal
touch. Student-to-teacher ratios are often around 15
to 1 or lower. “We have a commitment to our parents
that we will not allow one child to keep 15 or 16 others
from learning,” White says.
That kind of discipline has always been a part of what
private schools offered, no matter what their orientation.
Yet today’s evangelical schools are not like the
strict, authoritarian kind of schools that emerged in
the 1970s. Most are non-denominational in their admission
policies. Fredericksburg Christian, for example, has
students from 150 churches. Greenbrier Christian Academy’s
students attend 140 churches.
Despite the expanding enrollments and competitive academics,
there are boundaries to what such schools want to be.
Some are nearing the limits they’ve set for themselves.
Norfolk Christian doesn’t plan to go beyond 1,100
students. “Once we reach our goal, we’ll
stop there,” Patterson says. “We want to
be able to know the students, to know the families.
We don’t want to get so big that we’re not
manageable.”
