I had planned on writing one more article for Cougar Tracks as a final word upon retirement. Then, last week, while making a last visit to the South Bend area to put the final touch on our search for an apartment, I heard the news that Granger Christian School, in Granger, Indiana, just a few miles from Edwardsburg, Michigan, where we are moving, and considered a suburb of South Bend, announced that they would not open for classes this fall.
I always receive news like this with sadness. It has, unfortunately, become all too common among conservative Evangelical Christian school education for the past two decades. The numbers really are staggering. Half of the Christian schools that existed in the United States up to the year 2000 have closed in the past two and a half decades. Of course, corresponding to these closures, enrollment in Christian schools operated by Evangelical denominations, fellowships or churches has also declined by half in the same period of time.
Granger Christian School had existed for 55 years, and was one of the more well-established Christian schools in the South Bend-Mishawaka area. It was operated by Grace Church, an independent, non-denominational church that occupies a second building on the same campus as the school. No specific reason was given for the closure, except that enrollment had dropped below 100 students for the upcoming year, a principal who had been hired had decided to leave before the school year began, and the school was not financially viable.
This is not a rare occurrence. Over 200 Christian schools in the United States, either operated by Evangelical churches, or by independent groups of parents, made the decision at some point during the past spring or summer, not to open this fall. That's not as many as closed each year prior to the pandemic, but it is still a significant number, indicating that enrollment is continuing to decline. One of the main reasons for this is that the conservative Evangelical churches from which most of the students in Christian schools come, are also experiencing serious declines in attendance and membership, and the members of the millennial generation who now make up the vast majority of parents of school-aged children, are not found in large numbers among Evangelical churches.
I do not know whether Grace Church, which operated Granger Christian for 55 years, had the means to sustain the school through this low period, or whether they determined that circumstances did not warrant investing any further resources to keep the school's doors open. Apparently, they were planning to keep the school in operation until the leadership they had recently hired decided not to follow through. The surrounding community has had a very stable population over the past 35 years, meaning that it is aging, and there are fewer and fewer families there with school aged children, and even the local public schools have experienced a sharp drop in enrollment, as the population ages and retires. And that affects both churches and Christian schools.
Granger Christian had also recently converted their curriculum to a classical Christian model. It's difficult to make that kind of a shift unless all of the parents are on board with it. There's not anything specific with a classical model that would cause a decline, but change is never easy, and there is a significant enough difference between the classical model and the traditional approach to cause some parents to pull out if they weren't on board. One of the things I've learned as a Christian school administrator is that big changes in curriculum and instruction are not easy to make.
Understanding the commitment most parents make when they choose a Christian school that operates in the Evangelical faith tradition, it is my prayer that the families will be able to find a viable option for their children to continue their Christian school education. We also need to pray for the teachers and staff at Granger, and for Grace Church. This was a very difficult decision for them to make.
Does News Like This Make Us Appreciate the Blessings We Have?
I've worked for five different schools in the 38 years I spent in Christian school education. I was a teacher in two of them, a middle school principal in one, and the lead administrator in the last two. Four of the five schools were ministries that were operated by one local church, and one of them was a denominationally affiliated school that used facilities on two different church campuses until they raised money and built their own, independent campus.
Midwestern Christian Academy is the only one of the five where the school did not pay a lease or rent to the host church for use of facilities. In every other case, the school either paid a percentage of its budget, or an annual fee to use church facilities that would have stood empty six days a week otherwise. I believe that God blesses Midwest Bible Church for its faithful stewardship of MCA, which saves every parent thousands of dollars a year in tuition. It is an investment in the spiritual future of the students, at a time when the youngest generations are almost completely unchurched, and unreached by the Christian gospel.
We are also seeing the devastating effects of an attitude of consumerism and transactionalism on Christian schools. Instead of seeing a Christian school as a mutually supportive Christian community dedicated to the discipleship of the students, parents take on a consumer attitude. Enrollment becomes nothing more than a transaction, with parents taking the attitude that the money they pay for tuition entitles them to a specific set of transactions, or services. This doesn't work very well, because it ignores the fact that what parents pay doesn't cover the cost of their child's education, and that the collective sacrifice of the rest of the school community, including the teachers and staff, are what make this low tuition rate possible in the first place.
It would cost each student an additional $3,000 in tuition if MCA raised its minimum teacher salary to the entry level salary of a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools. That would be a raise to the very lowest level of public school pay. That means that your child's teacher, by their commitment to the school, and to each parent, is handing every student a $3,000 scholarship. But the transactional nature of the consumer attitude that has intruded into our churches and our Christian schools does not acknowledge the shared sacrifice of Christian community. The end result of that is parents miss the point of the mutual sacrifice which sustains the school, and lose sight of its Christian distinctiveness.
Take away the contribution of Midwest Bible Church, and the shared sacrifice of the teachers and staff, and that adds an additional $6,000 to the current average tuition of $5,500. That's still about $8,000 less than the average private school tuition in Chicago, and almost $18,000 less than the average, per-year cost to taxpayers of a public school student's education for one year. So the tuition and fees parents pay at Midwestern Christian, which is among the very lowest among Chicago's private schools, only covers half of the actual cost of the education. Someone else is sacrificing to make the other half work.
In just the past eight years of my tenure, Midwest Bible Church has invested over $700,000 in the ministry of Midwestern Christian Academy, not counting the use of the facilities. And generous contributors, many of them members of this church, some of them from the Christian community at large, have also invested over $500,000 in the school, including renovating and preserving the gym, and the window installation in the main building, in order to provide a comfortable place for students to learn and be safe. That's an additional $6,000 per student that is not included in tuition and fees.
So when we see another Christian school close, it should remind us of the blessing we still have, that ours remains open, and we need to renew our commitment to this shared Christian community ministry that is an investment in the next generation.
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