Growing our School
From
August 31, 2024
From the Pastor
As I write this, the building is full of activity. Teachers are running around making last minute preparations for the new school year. Tomorrow is our first day, and we are excited to get going! By the time you read this, we will likely have completed our first week of school. I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat: we have an amazing New Church faculty at the Washington New Church School.
As we launch into another academic year, we find ourselves at a pivotal moment. Last year, we collectively reimagined our school’s purpose and future and recommitted to working to make the school even better. We’ve committed to a broader scope, aiming to shape not just academically proficient students but spiritually aware adults ready to make positive contributions to our complex world.
Our mission is to support parents in nurturing the spiritual, moral, and intellectual development of their children, using a New Church curriculum taught by New Church teachers. We do this in order to nurture peacemakers, thinkers, and leaders who are grounded in the truths of the New Church. This isn’t just about teaching children. It’s a means of impacting the world meaningfully, ensuring our graduates are equipped to navigate and improve the moral and spiritual landscape they will inherit as adults.
And over the summer we’ve made plans to up our game. We are expanding on the success of our “project weeks” and bringing project-based learning into multiple parts of the curriculum. This hands-on approach to learning is in part driven by our conviction that a good New Church education is one focused on use, i.e., purpose. By tying some of the learning to specific projects with specific meaningful outcomes, we expect to see not only deeper learning of those lessons but also an increased fostering of a love of being useful.
It’s all extremely exciting. At the same time, due to a number of reasons, we are actually facing one of our lower enrollment years this year. We’ve had some students move on before finishing with us, and our number of new incoming students is lower than usual. In particular we have a small PreK/Kindergarten this year, in part due to the newly expanded pre-kindergarten offerings in PG County as part of a statewide expansion of public early education efforts.
As I mentioned many times in conversations throughout last year, there are four critical elements to our school: our mission and curriculum, our staff, our funding, and our student body / enrollment. Last year we focused on curriculum and mission. And over the past few years and in the next three to five, we have a focus on staffing as senior teachers continue to retire.
And right now, and in the coming academic year, we need to pivot from mission and curriculum to focus more on enrollment. We need enough students in each classroom to justify staffing those grades, and this means we need to make extra efforts to get next year’s enrollment back up. This isn’t just about numbers, though; it’s also about increasing our potential impact on the broader community around us, and on the world at large. Teaching more students means putting more young people out into the world who are armed with New Church truths, values, and habits. Addressing this challenge is not just about filling classrooms—it’s about extending our unique educational opportunities to more families and doing more good in the world.
And we can’t do it without the full support of the church. That means you.
Here are just four ways you can help us pursue our mission with a healthy number of students:
- Share our Website [www.wncschool.org]. We’ve launched a new website that beautifully encapsulates the essence of our school. It’s designed not just to inform but to invite—showcasing the depth and breadth of our educational philosophy. Share this new site on your social media platforms, email it to friends, or talk about it in your groups.
- Create and Share Testimonials: There’s immense power in personal stories. Consider sharing your experiences as a parent, as a church member, and/or as an alum at the school. Write reviews. Post to Facebook. Record videos for YouTube, TikTok or Instagram. Tweet about how cool our school is and find excuses to talk about it on NextDoor. Your voice can help others see the real-life impact of a New Church education at our school and might be just what a new family needs to hear to make their decision.
- Create Word-of-Mouth: Start conversations. Whether you’re at a community event, socializing with non-church friends or neighbors, or even just making small talk while in line at a grocery store, share your feelings about our school. Talk about how the school has touched your family, the positive changes you’ve seen in your children, and why you’re excited about what we are now doing.
- Increase your Donation: Or if you’ve never donated before, make a first-time donation! Contributing financially to our church will directly impact our ability to continue to operate the school, to hire great New Church teachers, and to fund marketing, publicity, and advertising efforts that I am heading up. Word of mouth is the best advertising, but our community only has so many mouths. Having more money for advertising lets us effectively buy extra “mouths” online and elsewhere to deliver our message and invite more families to join us.
Enrollment has a long lead-time. We are just starting the new school year and new students for the following year won’t be registering for many months. But the process by which a family chooses a school is long and winding and we need to start the process of reaching out to those future school families now.
In the coming year, I am excited to see how our collective efforts will manifest. With every new student who walks through our doors, we have an opportunity to expand our impact, weaving the values and teachings of the New Church into the fabric of more lives. We face some challenges and will continue to face challenges for as long as we are pursuing our mission. If running a New Church School were easy, it probably wouldn’t be worth doing. Put another way, anything important that changes lives and improves the world is going to face hurdles. This school has faced many over the past half century. We can deal with this year’s challenges as well, so long as we all have a will to make it happen and we all, as a church, pull together to face these challenges head on and overcome.
I could say more about our outreach efforts as well as our school recruiting, but I think I’ll stop here for now and just leave you with a quote. This is this year’s theme at the school, taken from Psalm 20:4-5:
May He grant you according to your heart’s desire,
and fulfill all your purpose.
We will rejoice in your salvation,
and in the name of our God we will set up our banners!
Rev. Glenn “Mac” Frazier