April 21, 2021 at 5:15 p.m.
Armis Dei Classical Christian Academy to open next fall
Armis Dei Classical Christian Academy to open next fall
By Stephanie Kuski-
ADCCA organizers are planning to hold informational meetings every three weeks or so through June so that prospective parents and students can get to know the school and its mission. On April 13, one such informational meeting was hosted with parents and students representing five different churches and four different communities in the Northwoods.
Jeremy Vander Galien, the pastor at Pine Grove Community Church, is spearheading the effort with his wife Mandi as well as other members of the community interested in opening a classical school. However, the Vander Galiens said ADCCA will be separate from Pine Grove Church, noting that the school is simply leasing space from the church, such as the classrooms, playground and cafeteria.
"We're trying to keep it as separate as we can," Vander Galien explained. "Because it's new, there's a closer tie now then there will be in three to five years. Just because my relationship network is larger here at this church, the people that are involved in this type of education at this church are helping us start, but we want our board to be diverse - not only Rhinelander and other communities, but our church and other churches. My wife and I would like to be out of any kind of leadership in the school in the next three years, because we wanted to get it started and then hand it off."
Jeremy and Mandi Vander Galien said they have been homeschooling their children classically for the past decade, but when they moved to Rhinelander five years ago, they started thinking about opening a classical school. Through several years of conversations, research and cultivating a network of interested individuals, the couple finally made the jump to open ADCCA next school year.
"I have been - myself - reading, researching, calling other schools, talking with parents, talking with friends and family who are in these kinds of schools, learning for 10 years," Jeremy Vander Galien said. "The group of us who started this started two years ago, then COVID hit and all that ... The real work started about six weeks ago."
Now the tentative plan is for fall 2021 to be the official start date for the new Christian academy. Currently, organizers are planning to offer 4K through fifth-grade for the first year the academy is open and add one grade each consecutive school year with the goal of eventually offering 4K through 12th-grade.
"Our commitment at Armis Dei is to prepare children, working closely with the parents, who can make an articulate, loving defense for the Christian faith in this world," Vander Galien explained at the informational meeting. "We plan to provide a school that is solidly Christian; we're not going to compromise on truth. We want to teach them a loving, intelligent way, but we want to make it thoroughly Christian."
Their mission statement for students says ADCCA "aims to equip students to lead and not merely respond to culture. To accomplish this, we provide a rigorous classical education that is unashamedly biblical."
Vander Galien said the main difference between ADCCA and other parochial schools in the area has to do with its classical-cooperative model.
Classical education is an approach to learning with origins dating back to the ancient world of the Greeks and Romans. One premise of the classical model is the trivium, or the idea that children go through three developmental stages throughout their lives that require different methods of learning. In the grammar stage, for instance, students are like sponges when it comes to learning new information and thus readily memorize facts through chants and songs. As they get older, students enter the logic stage where they begin to assess the validity of arguments and learn to view information critically. In the rhetoric stage, students learn to craft eloquent arguments using the tools and knowledge acquired in the earlier stages.
In addition to the trivium approach, classical education focuses strongly on liberal arts. For this reason, ADCCA students will not only read rigorous literature, but even learn Latin.
"The classical learning includes a set of subjects that's not typically included in our kind of education. The first one is Latin," Vander Galien explained. "Latin is a very important part of classical education. The question is always asked: 'Why Latin?' ... Well, there's a few reasons. First, it's the mother language of all languages in the West .... A ton of English words have Latin roots, so as students learn Latin, they're learning the English language much better. As they learn Latin, they're going to be able to acquire other languages much more easily, such as Spanish ... As students learn Latin, they're learning what words actually mean and their range of meanings."
Another important distinction is the cooperative model ADCCA will utilize. In their mission statement for parents, ADCCA notes that parents are given the "primary authority and responsibility for the education of their children." Because ADCCA believes that parents are responsible for educating their children but recognizes the modern pitfalls of homeschooling, the academy provides an alternative for parental involvement in their children's education.
"Everybody knows the leading indicator of the success of a child, even defined biblically, the main indicator is parental involvement in the education of their students," Vander Galien said. "But when you do a five-day-a-week, eight-hours-a-day kind of school, it's a struggle to get the parents involved ... Our kind of school actually gets the parents involved in the education, and the wonderful little secret is, parents get trained and they learn right along with the kids ... Our model is actually a discipleship model for parents. You have to get trained, you have to learn, you have to work with your kids. So the school provides that training for you ... This isn't a co-op where parents get together and do certain lessons ... It's actually a school where the parents function as co-teachers."
Because of this cooperative model, students will be on campus for only a portion of the week where they are instructed by a professional teacher. But for the other days of the week, students are at a satellite location (i.e. home) in which the parents, grandparents or another family figure acts as a co-teacher by teaching their children lessons prepared by the class teacher.
4K and kindergarten students will be on ADCCA's campus Mondays and Wednesdays from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. with the expectation that parents or another family member will co-teach their children on Tuesdays and Thursdays. First- through fifth-grade students will be on campus Mondays and Wednesdays from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. with the same expectation that Tuesdays and Thursdays are reserved for parental teaching at home. Fridays will occasionally be used for field trips and class get-togethers throughout the 32-week school year.
Four teachers are already on board to teach next school year with the hopes of adding more teachers to instruct students in extracurricular subjects like physical education and music as well as higher-level subjects like calculus and physics when older grades are added on. As the plan stands currently, Amy Cottrell will teach 4K and kindergarten, Bekka Godere will teach first and second grade, Mandi Vander Galien will teach grades three through five and Heidi Koval will teach art.
The Vander Galiens said their goal is to have 30 4K through fifth-grade students in the first year. In the second year, their goal is to have 40 students in grades 4K through sixth as well as hire a headmaster. In their third year, they hope to have 50 students in grades 4K through seventh with the goal of adding one grade a year until they offer 4K through 12th-grade.
"We need $100,000 in our fundraising budget to be able to hire a headmaster full-time next year and do all of the things we need to do to start a school for three years," Mandi Vander Galien explained. "Then we figure by year four, we'll be self-sufficient and we'll be taking care of ourselves ... We've only been fundraising for a month and today we're a little over $68,000 of $100,000."
For the first year, the approximate cost per student will be $1,050 for 4K and kindergarten students and $2,100 for first- through fifth-grade students.
Interested students from outside the School District of Rhinelander are also welcome to join ADCCA, which is open to all denominations of Christianity.
Prospective families interested in applying to ADCCA must first attend an informational meeting before starting the application process. The next informational meeting will be held at 10 a.m. on Saturday, May 8 at Pine Grove Community Church.
Applications are due June 1, 2021 and include references, transcripts and parent/student interviews to determine the compatibility of the family's goals with that of ADCCA.
For more information about ADCCA, visit their website at armisdeiacademy.com or follow Armis Dei Classical Christian Academy on Facebook. Jeremy Vander Galien can be reached by calling 715-360-1984 or by emailing
jvandergalien@
protonmail.com. Mandi Vander Galien can be reached by calling 920-602-4740 or emailing [email protected].
Comments:
You must login to comment.