19 How Do Christian Schools Affiliate?

Harriet and her husband were just as excited at this next stage of their child’s Christian education as they had been when their child first started at Christian school. They had just celebrated their child’s graduation from the Christian elementary and middle school their child had attended since fourth grade. While a few families from the same Christian school were sending their children on to the local public high school, Harriet and her husband had instead decided, with their child’s urging, to continue their child’s faith education at a nearby Christian high school. The Christian high school had an affiliation with their child’s Christian elementary and middle school, that was making their child’s move to the new school, with most of their child’s middle school classmates, all at once natural, reassuring, and exciting. 

Affiliation

When your family joins a Christian school community, that community is not alone in its commitment to Christian education. You may initially feel as if your child’s new Christian school is a sacred island in a secular educational sea. You may feel as if your family and other families in your new Christian school are swimming against a current of secularism, materialism, consumerism, corporatism, and other ideologies set against, or at least ignorant and dismissive of, your family’s Christian faith. Yet Christian schools affiliate with one another in a variety of ways that strengthen and support each local school community, relieving their sense of isolation. Your family and other families in your new Christian school are not alone in your pursuit of Christian education to preserve and enhance your Christian faith and way of life. You will soon find that your family’s new Christian school is part of a vital and growing network of Christian schools. Those schools work alongside and with one another to carry out their profound mission of preserving and enhancing their students’ Christian faith and developing their Christian character, while giving them an excellent academic education. Appreciate how your child’s new Christian school works alongside other Christian schools in the following ways, to better serve your family. 

Accreditation

Accreditation through the same Christian education organization is one way in which Christian schools connect with one another. The Association of Christian Schools International and the American Association of Christian Schools are two examples of accrediting bodies, together serving thousands of the nation’s Christian schools. Accreditation establishes common standards for Christian schools, aligning their practices and curricula. Accreditation also makes area Christian schools accountable to one another. Periodic accreditation reviews involve volunteers from other area Christian schools examining and reporting on the programs and practices of the Christian school under review. Through accreditation, area Christian schools closely examine, influence, and learn from one another’s programs. Accreditation reviews also cement strong, positive relationships among key personnel from all area Christian schools sharing the same accreditation. Take heart that your child’s Christian school leaders know exactly what is going on in other nearby Christian schools sharing the same accreditation. That common accreditation promotes common accountability, collaboration, and consistency among them.

Services

Christian schools also form, join, and participate in statewide, regional, and national service-and-support organizations. Schools are complex organizations that need to stay abreast of significant changes in law, educational practices, technologies, and program financing, among other fields and functions. Your child’s Christian school likely belongs to one or more Christian school service organizations that provide updates, alerts, training, seminars, conferences, and consultations. Leaders and staff members from your child’s Christian school may attend a Christian school service organization’s annual conference for workshops on teaching tips, behavior strategies, assessment strategies, building security, new educational technologies, and a host of other significant school subjects. Those leaders and staff members may also present at the conference, while renewing and making new professional acquaintances with staff members from other Christian schools. Your child’s Christian school isn’t an island. It is instead part of a vital web of cooperating Christian schools.

Advocacy

Christian schools also gather to advocate with state, county, and local legislative bodies and executive leaders and agencies, for their common interests. Christian service organizations like the ones mentioned in the prior paragraph often engage in lobbying at the state or national level. The federal tax-credit program benefiting private Christian schools, included in 2025’s Big Beautiful Bill Act, is an example. Christian school associations advocated for years for Congress to enact that provision. Christian school associations then advocated with state governors to approve the program for their state, as the federal legislation invited. Government advocacy in common can plainly help Christian schools preserve and enhance their legal rights. Christian school service organizations can also advocate and negotiate with private providers of goods and services to Christian schools. Your child’s Christian school may benefit from health insurance coverage, commercial general liability insurance policies, technology service contracts, security contracts, and other contracts for goods and services its Christian school service organization negotiated.

Consortium

Some Christian schools operating within the same metropolitan, suburban, or rural area also form consortiums, on the premise that they are stronger coordinating some operations and sharing some services than doing everything on their own. An area consortium of Christian schools may, for instance, share marketing and advertising services, promoting their schools collectively on local media with similar branding. An area consortium may also centralize financial, legal, compliance, insurance, personnel, and other business-operation services, for efficiencies and cost savings. An area consortium may also support teacher and administrator collaborations for training, and may support common special programs across the member schools out of centralized resources. Area consortiums do not attempt to govern the individual schools. Rather, each individual school retains its own board, mission, history, and identity. But area Christian schools coordinating central services can prove themselves to be better together. 

District

Local Christian schools also sometimes form their own private school district. A private school district differs from an area consortium in that the district also centralizes responsibility and authority over the individual schools, in addition to providing centralized services. A district of Christian schools may, for instance, only have a single district school board rather than a board over each school. A district of Christian schools may also have a single set of business, operational, governance, and academic policies, rather than each individual school maintaining its own policies. A district of Christian schools may also have a coordinated fundraising campaign and single tuition program, supporting a single district budget, even if each individual school operates under its own budget account. Perhaps most significantly, though, a private Christian school district may coordinate grade-level and other program offerings at each school, to reduce or eliminate competition and create a feeder system, as the following paragraphs further address. 

Coordination

Christian schools located geographically close enough to one another to draw from the same population of prospective students may end up competing for those students. Public school districts attempt to eliminate competition among their schools by drawing boundary lines for attendance at each school. Magnet schools and state school-choice laws may give parents some public school options, and families may also move from neighborhood to neighborhood to gain enrollment of their children in a favored public school. But competition between public schools isn’t generally an issue. Private Christian schools, though, do not typically draw boundary lines to limit enrollment, thus leaving the prospect for competition among them for the same students. Of course, Christian schools can commit their instruction to different Christian faith traditions, to distinguish to some degree their attraction for families within those different faith traditions, thus tamping down if not eliminating direct school competition. Christian schools may also deliberately coordinate their grade-level offerings with other Christian schools to eliminate or reduce competition. One Christian school, for instance, may only offer lower elementary classes, while another Christian school may conduct the area’s middle school program and another Christian school conducts the area’s high school program. You may find your community offering Christian education from the preschool through high school levels but at different schools that coordinate their programs. 

Feeders

Some area Christian schools also deliberately preserve and pursue a feeder system for an area Christian high school. Private high schools can be more costly to operate. High schools have greater requirements for advanced and differentiated academic instruction, requiring additional specialized teaching staff members. High schools can also have greater requirements for academic, behavioral, and disability support, requiring additional specialized staffing. High schools also need additional specialized classrooms, auditoriums, furnishing, and equipment for science labs, music programs, theater programs, and other special programs. High schools also need larger and more-varied athletics facilities, fields, and equipment. The same can be true for middle schools, when compared to lower-elementary schools. In short, while a locale may have multiple competing Christian elementary schools, any one locale is less likely to be able to support multiple competing Christian middle schools and high schools. Thus, expect your locale to have fewer choices of Christian middle schools and even fewer choices of Christian high schools. Accordingly, expect the lower-level Christian schools in your area to have formal or informal feeder relationships to the local Christian middle school and local Christian high school. 

Familiarity

A feeder relationship between your child’s Christian elementary school and your local Christian middle school and high school should smooth your child’s progression from preschool to twelfth grade and high school graduation. Christian schools that maintain a feeder structure and relationship take deliberate steps to support students and their families in the transitions from school to school. First, the students at a Christian school having feeder relationships with lower-level area Christian schools will mostly be graduates of those schools. They will know the lower-level schools, their teachers, and their students. The upper-level Christian school’s administrators may have their students return to their lower-level schools as mentors to assist the lower-level students with their move to the upper-level school. Your child may, in effect, feel as if your child is progressing with the same students above, in, and below your child’s class. Only the building, not the student population, changes. That familiarity can ensure your student’s confidence and preserve your student’s supportive peer relationships. 

Community

The cooperative, supportive, coordinated, and feeder relationships of area Christian schools can do more than serve your child as your child progresses from school to school. Those relationships can also serve you and your spouse and other family members. Your family remains within the same Christian community when your child progresses from one Christian school to another. Parents progress from school to school with their children. The parent friendships and acquaintances that you formed in your child’s Christian elementary school community continue as the children move to middle school and then to high school. Indeed, those parent relationships may grow stronger as you share your children’s school progression and each family grows and matures along with the progression. You should find ever greater satisfaction in proceeding in your family’s Christian education journey and earthly journey, with other families sharing your Christian commitments, character, and faith. 

Reflection

Do you know the relationship that your child’s new Christian school maintains with other area Christian schools? Do you look forward to your child progressing from your child’s current Christian school to another Christian school in your area, offering higher grade levels? Have you seen evidence of how your child’s current Christian school coordinates grade levels or programs with a higher-level Christian school in your area? Does your child’s Christian school share business services with other area Christian schools? Is your child’s Christian school part of a private Christian school district with centralized budget, governance, and services? Do you have any concern that your child will not be able to continue and complete Christian education through high school in your area, with smooth transitions between schools? 

Key Points

• Christian schools affiliate in various helpful ways with one another. 

• Christian schools’ common accreditation draws them closer together.

• Christian schools participate in common service associations.

• Christian schools advocate and negotiate together through association.

• Christian schools form local consortiums to consolidate services.

• Christian schools form local private centralized school districts. 

• Christian schools coordinate grade-level and program offerings. 

• Christian schools form feeder systems to upper-level schools.

• Christian school feeder systems ease student and family transitions.

• Christian school feeder systems promote continuing community.

Read Chapter 20.