BY DAN HILDEBRAN
The pastor of Fresh Start Fellowship said his congregation is starting an elementary school next school year.
Fresh Start Academy will begin with 10 kindergarteners for the 2024-2025 school year.
“Kindergarten only is what we’re beginning with this year,” Steve Conner said. “The plan is to build slowly a grade at a time.”
Connor added that although Hope Baptist Church in Bradford County offers a Christian education, two other church-based schools in Keystone Heights, operated by Community Church and Friendship Bible Church, have closed over the years, leaving the Lake Region underserved in Christian education.
He added that he and other church leaders have been planning Fresh Start Academy for two years.
The pastor said the church’s worship leader, Jamie Graves, a Florida-certified teacher with an education degree from the University of Florida, will lead the inaugural class of 10 students.
“She graduated with the intent of going into elementary education and then began to really feel kind of a pull to maybe start her own small school,” Conner said of the instructor. “And that just kind of merged with us as we were looking at what we were doing, and she was praying about what she wanted to do.”
Conner said Graves worked in early learning centers in Gainesville and concluded she could not fulfill her vision of education in those organizations.
“And so, she began to look at what she could do on her own,” Conner continued. “She and her husband began actually looking at buildings in the community and all that kind of stuff. And that was probably a year before the Lord opened the doors here with us.”
The pastor said his vision for Fresh Start Academy began after his church started hosting a local home school network, Classical Conversations of Keystone, in its building.
“They were looking for a place where they could meet once a week,” Conner recalled. “They were using another church mostly that they had outgrown, so they came in here for a year.”
Conner said the home school group’s presence coincided with his growing conviction that his congregation should enter education.
“It’s like, yeah, this is what we need to be doing,” he recalled. “So that was the impetus for this.”
Small classes, certified teachers
Conner said that, based on his research, small class sizes are a key component of a student’s success, and the new school will emphasize that feature.
“Ten-to-one is the ratio,” he said of Fresh Start’s class sizes. “That’s part of the uniqueness of what we’re doing. We’ll never do more than 12, but 10-to-one is what we’re looking at, which is much better than what the public schools have. It’s probably one-half of what the public schools do; I’m just guessing.”
Conner also said certified instructors will lead students at Fresh Start.
“A lot of Christian schools, and I’m not belittling them at all, but a lot of Christian schools don’t feel the need, and they’re not required by the state to have certified teachers,” he said. “We think that’s important. We think having a qualified, certified teacher is extremely important.”
It’s not about the money
Conner said the biggest question people are asking him is why the church is only starting with kindergarten.
His response is that running a school is new to him, to Graves and to Student and Family Pastor Mark Southam.
“This is all new territory for all of us as far as running a school,” he said. “Mistakes. We are on a learning curve, and there’s less opportunity to do real damage to anything if we have a small group. You lower your risk and learn.”
Conner said that with the expansion of Florida’s Family Empowerment Scholarships, some private schools might be tempted to expand as quickly as possible.
“We’ll never get to where we just say: Okay, we want the money that comes with the kids, so we’ll just bring in more kids.,” he said. “We’re not looking to make money off this. This is not a money-making project for the church. And I don’t say that as if that’s what churches do this for, but it does bring in income to churches.”
He added that his school’s commitment to certified teachers and small class sizes limits the revenue additional students could generate because, with every 10 new students, the school would hire an additional certified teacher.
Distinctively Christian
Conner said the curriculum at Fresh Start Academy will be distinctively Christian.
“We want a Christian worldview with a solid education foundation at the elementary level: reading, writing, arithmetic.”
The pastor said that teaching a Christian worldview means teaching that everything about the story of humanity is really a reflection of the story of God.
“Our lives are impacted by that view,” he said. “We, as an evangelical Christian Church, believe that Jesus Christ is God. So therefore, it comes from that worldview that evolution is not something you’re going to be teaching to a kindergartner, but I think probably by fourth and fifth grades, they’re beginning to look at those types of things in school, dealing with dinosaurs, dealing with the age of the earth, all those kinds of things. We’re going to view that from a very distinctly Christian perspective. I’m not saying that we won’t teach opposing views, but we will teach them as that, not as fact.”
