14 What Are Christian School Programs?

Darlene and her daughter had just returned from the Christian school’s annual week-long mission trip to a Central American village with which the school had long maintained a faith and charitable relationship. The school reserved the trip for its students at the higher grade levels. Parents often but not always went along, some parents instead entrusting their child’s care and supervision to another parent or couple. Darlene, though, had looked forward to the trip for years, and it had more than lived up to her every expectation. The best part for Darlene was the growth in confidence and character that she had seen her daughter experience, using her new foreign-language skills to graciously engage local youths of her own age. Darlene loved her daughter’s Christian school.

Programs

For some students, the quality of a school experience depends largely on co-curricular and extracurricular programs. No wonder that some schools use participation in student activities as a carrot to gain student engagement in their academic studies and compliance with behavioral rules. Those schools threaten loss of school activity privileges unless the student conforms. Some students will do anything the school asks, simply to retain their ability to participate in those extra school activities, outside of the required curriculum, that mean so much to them. School co-curricular and extracurricular programs can round out a school curriculum, fill in its gaps, enrich its depth, and broaden its scope, to the great benefit of the involved students. Christian schools can be unusually rich in valuable co-curricular and extracurricular programs, as the following discussion shows. Appreciate the benefit to your child of the co-curricular, extracurricular, and other special programs available through your child’s Christian school. 

Chapel

Chapel services are the first co-curricular program one connects with private Christian K-12 schools. Daily or weekly chapel services are an integral aspect of a Christian school’s faith curriculum and spiritual mission. Chapel services encourage students to pray, sing, move, play musical instruments, recite, teach, preach, and worship together. Local pastors, school teachers and administrators, special parent invitees, and other special guests may lead the chapel service or give a homily, teaching, or sermon. Yet students may also take the lead role or supporting roles in each aspect. That participation can do wonders not only for a student’s Christian faith but also for the student’s confidence and performance or public-speaking skills, depending on the student’s roles. Chapel services also unite students’ hearts, center those hearts on the Lord Jesus Christ, and remind school administrators and staff members of the Lord’s central school role, all to the Lord’s delight.

Daycare

Daycare can be another significant Christian school program. Christian school daycare enables parents to begin their young child’s time at the school at an earlier age. Some Christian school daycares also enable parents to extend their older child’s stay on school premises beyond school hours, in the early morning or late afternoon. Parents can struggle to find reliable daycare for their infant and very young children, before their preschool age. The advantage to parents of relying on Christian school daycare programs includes that the child and parents become accustomed to the school’s personnel, facility, and programs, easing the transition into preschool and kindergarten at the school. Working parents or parents with other pressing responsibilities early in the morning or late in the afternoon also sometimes need daycare for their older, school-age children, before and after school hours. Some Christian schools offer those daycare, or surround-care, programs, with the same advantage of keeping their child in one familiar location for both school and outside-of-school-hours care. Christian school daycare programs can also have more stability and depth in staffing, given the school’s church and faith community on which the programs may draw for staffing. 

Preschool

Christian schools also often offer preschool programs, with the same idea of introducing parents and their children to the school program before its formal kickoff with kindergarten. Some Christian schools offer both half-day and full-day preschool programs, and alternative five-day, three-day, or two-day programs. They may also offer a Young 5’s class for children not sufficiently ready for kindergarten but ready for more than preschool. Christian preschool can be an excellent way to introduce your child to the school facility, personnel, and programs, and to ease yourself into the Christian school parent community. Having your child in the school’s preschool program will also help you learn the strengths, skills, gifts, and personalities of teachers, aides, other staff members, and administrators, and how they will be able to meet your child’s needs. If the Christian school that you are considering for your child’s enrollment has a preschool program, enroll your child in that program to help you evaluate, commit, and acclimate to the school. Preschool enrollment may also ensure your opportunity to enroll your child in the school’s kindergarten, when the time comes, if applications exceed program capacity.

Trips

Christian schools can be especially rich in field trip opportunities for your child. Well-timed and well-planned field trips to the right destinations can add significant value to a school curriculum. Students learn from and look forward to field trips. Christian schools may offer a greater number, variety, and quality of field trips due to the schools’ commitment to educating the whole child, generally smaller class sizes, greater parent and school resources, and greater availability of parents to drive and supervise students. Christian schools may offer younger students field trips to special local playstations, splash pads, children’s museums, firehouses, funhouses, petting farms, fruit farms, pumpkin fields, and other safe, engaging, and informative places of interest. Christian schools may offer somewhat older students field trips to more-distant day destinations like libraries, amusement parks, water parks, metropolitan museums of art and natural history, seaquariums, outdoor adventure facilities, school and church campgrounds, legislatures, appellate courts, and other appropriate recreational and educational destinations. Christian schools may also take older students on especially significant, once-in-a-lifetime, week-long field trips to Washington, D.C., or other national destinations. Look forward to the great educational benefit of the field trips that your child’s Christian school offers, whether you join your child on those trips or not. 

Missions

Some Christian schools maintain special educational and charitable relationships with church or Christian school communities in other countries. Your child’s Christian school community may, for instance, hold bake sales to raise funds, make blankets or toys, or gather donated books and writing materials for a church, orphanage, mission, or school community in Central or South America, the Caribbean, or overseas. Those charitable programs raise your child’s awareness of the breadth and depth of the world’s material and spiritual needs. They also develop your child’s compassion and focus your child’s attention on meeting others’ needs. Your child’s Christian school may also offer day-long, overnight, or week-long mission trips for light student service work and fellowship in Christian schools or churches in disadvantaged communities within the United States. Some Christian schools also offer week-long or other extended charitable mission trips to locations outside the country. The schools include parents on those trips, making them a unique, once-in-a-lifetime family experience. 

STEM

Many Christian schools offer special STEM programs actively engaging students in science, technology, engineering, and math projects. STEM programs in schools everywhere seek to educate students in the principles, practices, skills, and technologies that will enable them to participate in STEM-related vocations. Christian schools offering STEM programs, though, also focus on helping students develop a deeper understanding of God’s patterns, principles, laws, order, and designs in the world, and a Christian’s special gifts and place in God’s creation. Christian schools also use STEM programs to help students develop problem-solving skills, drawing on their deep understanding of God’s forces, laws, and designs to discern solutions benefiting humankind. Christian school STEM programs help students learn how to be God’s stewards of his creation, pursuing God’s desire to relieve human suffering and experience his kingdom on earth. 

Immersion

Many Christian schools also offer special foreign-language immersion programs. Christian schools do so to promote their students’ cross-cultural sensitivity, equip students for foreign missions, and develop students’ cognitive and language capacities. Foreign-language instruction at any grade level, but especially at an early age, stimulates cognitive growth and language skills. Foreign-language instruction is thus common in public and private schools across the country, especially at higher grade levels. Christian school immersion programs, though, teach younger students, often from kindergarten through fifth grade or higher, all subjects solely in the foreign language, significantly expanding their foreign-language exposure, use, and skills. Thousands of Christian schools offer immersion programs, especially in Spanish but also in French and Mandarin. The increasingly numerous classical Christian schools may alternatively offer Latin, associated with ancient classical texts, or offer ancient Greek, the original language of the four versions of the New Testament gospel. Expect your child’s Christian school to offer some form of foreign-language program to promote your student’s development, open your student’s heart, and sharpen your student’s language skills and mind. 

Outdoor

Some Christian schools offer outdoor-learning programs, as another way to help students appreciate the beauty, order, and richness of God’s creation. Christian school outdoor-learning programs encourage students to respect, appreciate, and enjoy the outdoors, while learning botany, zoology, biology, ecology, geology, conservation, gardening, animal husbandry, and other natural science subjects. Outdoor-learning programs can also involve students in outdoor exercise and recreation, including obstacle courses, fishing, butterfly and bug collection, landscaping, and construction and engineering projects. The programs can thus captivate the interest and engage the energies of especially active students, including those who might face greater behavioral or learning challenges in a restricted indoor environment. Consider a Christian school outdoor-learning program for your child.

Interim

Many Christian schools also offer interim, gap, interlude, interregnum, or winterum programs. Christian school gap programs typically replace a week or so of classes between semesters or terms. The programs offer students a smorgasbord of project, program, or special-course options. The school’s regular teachers may design and lead some of those options, while school administrators may recruit school parents, local professionals, and others to design and lead other options. The options tend to focus on special vocations, activities, crafts, and fields that integrate knowledge and skills bases, so that students get to experience and explore things ordinarily unavailable to them. These interregnum courses may, for instance, include hospital visits with CPR practice, carpentry projects, weaving or sowing projects, courtroom visits with trial skills practice, model building, computer coding, and cooking and hospitality practice, among many other potential subjects. Gap week can be an exciting and highly engaging time for Christian school students, teachers, and parents, exactly the kind of experience to recharge your child for the next school term. 

Theater

Many Christian schools have rich and elaborate theater programs. The Christian school calendar typically includes at least Christmas and Easter, but also often other special days like Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, and Reformation Day, and seasons like Advent and Lent. These and other religious holidays, seasons, and festivals offer abundant opportunities for theater productions including drama, dance, costumes, sets, music, and song. Parents’ day, grandparents’ day, Thanksgiving, and other non-religious but traditional school events and celebrations can add to the theater opportunities. Christian school theater programs can also stage their own elaborate productions, entirely apart from any particular religious or traditional holiday celebration. Christian school theater programs can draw dozens if not hundreds of students into grand, all-school productions or instead involve a single class or group of classes at a single grade level or two or three grade levels. Theater allows students to practice roles, explore their presentation skills and personality, gain confidence, and develop communication, dance, musical, and vocal skills. Theater also allows students to develop social, leadership, and teamwork skills. Anticipate enjoying your child’s Christian school theater productions and appreciating your child’s consequential development. 

Choir

Many Christian schools supplement their theater programs and adorn their chapel services with student choirs. Singing is an ancient and celebrated Christian tradition. Scripture itself shares the lyrics of nearly two-hundred songs. The Christian vocal catalog includes hymns, chants, anthems, cantatas, spirituals, gospel, and praise songs. Depending on your child’s Christian school faith tradition, your child might hear, practice, and perform in school any of those forms or other forms of explicitly Christian song, making for an especially rich vocal music program in your child’s Christian school. Christian school students also sing ballads, folk songs, patriotic songs, and other traditional but not explicitly religious songs. Christian song in school raises and informs students’ spirits, increases their attention, engagement, and energy, and gives them practice in memory, poise, confidence, and public performance, among other benefits. Expect your student to enjoy plenty of opportunities for vocal music training and performance in Christian school. 

Band

Christian schools also typically offer rich instrumental music programs, amplified by opportunities to practice and present musical skills in chapel services, theater productions, and other school assemblies. Christian school music programs, while teaching musical instruments, music theory, and music reading, also stimulate student development of fine-motor, memory, and cognitive skills, while challenging and strengthening student attention, concentration, self-control, perseverance, and discipline. The Christian faith and character of the music instructors and students bolsters their efforts. Christian schools with strong music programs and talented student musicians may offer not just general band but also marching band, worship band, drum line, orchestra, and various ensembles. Value your child’s Christian school music program, especially if your child has a strong interest in musical training. 

Clubs

Christian schools also typically support multiple student clubs, organized around popular student interests. Christian school clubs give students opportunities to lead and engage in student group activities of their own choosing and interest, with appropriate teacher guidance and supervision. Club participation can make a Christian student especially confident, upbeat, engaged, and well rounded. Common Christian school clubs and activities include Bible studies, worship teams, mission teams, service teams, prayer groups, and fellowship groups. Christian schools also commonly include traditional school clubs like speech clubs, debate clubs, art clubs, academic clubs, student councils, and clubs organized around games and recreations like chess, skiing, sewing, and even hunting, fishing, kayaking, and other outdoor recreations in some regions and communities. Expect your child to enjoy student clubs at Christian school, and watch your child develop out of those experiences. 

Athletics

Christian schools also routinely include the traditional forms of school athletics programs. Depending on the school’s size and facilities, and the interests of its student body, Christian schools may offer football, basketball, baseball, softball, soccer, volleyball, track and field, tennis, swimming, diving, wrestling, and other sports programs, either in school leagues or in intraschool and intramural club forms. Christian school sports teams may compete in a Christian schools league or may instead compete in a league having public school sports teams or other private school teams. Athletics programs can offer your child exercise, strengthening, physical skill development, teamwork training, and practice in attention, concentration, perseverance, and discipline, while also improving your child’s skills in the specific sport. Athletic competitions and success can also increase your child’s confidence in life and social relations, and engagement in school. Value your child’s athletics opportunities at Christian school. 

Social

Christian schools can also offer social events for students to form healthy friend relationships and develop social skills. Christian schools have supervised school or grade pizza nights, movie nights, family fun nights, father/daughter dinners, ice-cream sundae outings, park and beach outings, field days, spiritual retreats, and prayer walks. They also offer beginning-of-year camps for team building and amusement-park outings for end-of-year celebrations. Christian school students are not cloistered, stolid, and silent. Visit a Christian school, and you will observe confident, energetic, and respectful students enjoying one another’s Christian fellowship and good company wherever they are in their school day. Expect your child to develop strong and healthy social skills and school relationships. 

Reflection

In what special school programs did you participate as a grade-school student? What special school program was most meaningful to you? Do you expect your child to participate in special school programs? What school programs do you believe would most benefit your child? What programs do you believe your child would be most likely to pursue and enjoy? Would you prefer to enroll your child in a Christian school daycare or preschool? Do you look forward to the field trips that your child may enjoy in Christian school? Would you want your child to participate in service or mission trips in Christian school, in addition to fun or educational field trips? Would you be interested in joining your child on a special educational trip to Washington, D.C., or another special location? Would you be interested in joining your child on a Christian school mission trip, whether locally, regionally, or internationally? Would you consider a foreign-language immersion program to be valuable for your child? Would you consider an outdoor-learning program to be valuable for your child? What clubs would your child enjoy in Christian school? Would you be interested in leading an interregnum project for your child’s Christian school? If so, what special field, interest, or vocation might you be able to demonstrate to students and allow them to explore? Do you anticipate that your child will engage in a school athletics program? Which sports might your child most enjoy? 

Key Points

• Christian schools offer abundant developmental activities for students.

• Christian schools routinely conduct regular student chapel services.

• Christian schools may offer daycare for infants and students of all ages.

• Christian schools may offer preschool and Young 5’s classes.

• Christian schools offer abundant age-appropriate field trips.

• Christian schools offer local, regional, and foreign missions trips. 

• Christian schools often offer special project-based STEM programs.

• Christian schools often offer foreign-language immersion programs.

• Christian schools may offer special outdoor-learning programs.

• Christian schools often offer special gap or interim programs. 

• Christian schools typically offer rich theater programs.

• Christian schools offer rich vocal and instrumental music programs.

• Christian schools offer abundant clubs for special student interests.

• Christian schools offer traditional athletic programs suited to facilities.

• Christian schools offer special supervised social opportunities. 

Read Chapter 15.