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Six years ago, Billy Miller, the headmaster at Resurrection Christian School in Plaza Midwood, invited the heads of several other small Christian schools in Charlotte to breakfast. He had something to ask them.
“My fundamental question was, ‘Why are we doing this? Why are we competing with each other for a limited number of students in a small area?” Miller recalled recently. He floated an idea: a merger that would allow the schools to pool resources and build enrollment.
It didn't happen then. Miller soon left for a pastor's job in Virginia, then returned to Charlotte three years ago to take the pastor's job at Resurrection Lutheran Church, which ran Resurrection Christian. One of the headmasters who had attended the breakfast, Randy Briscoe, was then pastor at Garr Memorial Church, a Pentecostal church that ran its own school, Garr Christian Academy.
The two decided to revisit the merger idea. There were only two. All the other schools had closed.
But Aug. 25 was the first day of classes at Charlotte United Christian Academy, a private school of about 220 students and 50 staff largely retained from Resurrection and Garr. The preschool-12th grade school occupies the former Garr campus and aims to offer a reasonably affordable option for parents who want a private, Christian education – and gives the school a better chance to survive than Resurrection and Garr would have had separately.
“I have to be honest with you, getting churches and Christian schools to cooperate is much more challenging than I believe it should be,” Miller said. “Right now, the model seems to be an independent school with exorbitant tuition or sponsored independently by a megachurch. If you don't fit one of those two categories, your options seem to be limited, and that just doesn't seem right to me.”
The school has established a pair of foundations to raise money – one to offer scholarships, another to help fund a program for about 30 autistic students the school hopes it can integrate into the regular curriculum. Annual tuition for grades K-5 is $3,780 for church members, $4,725 for nonmembers; for grades 6-12, it's $4,160 for members, $5,200 for nonmembers. Resurrection Lutheran has committed to directing $175,000 per year from offerings to the school.
The tuition, while not cheap, is comparable to what both the Resurrection and Garr schools charged last year, said Janet Atwell, CUCA's principal; she was the principal at Resurrection for its last four years. Even so, it wasn't enough to keep all the students from the two schools. CUCA lost about 50 students through graduation or from parents sending their children to public schools – underscoring the difficulty small, private schools have in a bad economy.
Still, administrators hope the larger pool of students and families makes for a secure future for the new school.
