Looking Ahead: Further Up and Further In
We would like to thank everyone who attended our fundraising dinner and auction. The evening was a success for the school and a lot of fun for the families who attended. What is truly encouraging about this event, is that it highlights the Christian communal nature of our efforts to build Ancient Paths. Many families and individuals from our community used their unique gifts and talents to bless the school with donations for the auction. Fresh local eggs, plumbing services, works of art, baking skills, babysitting, cooking, hand crafted furniture, and staycations all represent the many and varied ways God has moved in the hearts of people and used their gifts to build a school where children can be brought up in the culture of the Lord. This continued support from the families we have partnered with and from the broader community enables us to carry out God honoring discipleship and education at Ancient Paths.
One of the metrics we can look at to demonstrate the fruit of our labor so far is reading fluency. Reading fluency measures how many words per minute a student can read out loud from an unfamiliar passage. Omissions, mispronunciations, and insertions are counted against a student’s final score. The graph below shows how our students’ reading fluency has improved over the course of the year and compares their fluency with national averages.
Reading fluency is assessed with every child enrolling at Ancient Paths and then it is tracked throughout the year. Our fifth grade students are reading on average 167 words per minute (wpm). This is compared to the national average of 127 wpm. These students began the year right at the national average. Our school average across all grades is 36 words per minute above the national average. This places us in the 80th percentile for national reading fluency. However, more significantly, our students have improved their reading fluency from the time of admittance into our school by an average of 45 wpm. The national average for mid-year improvement is only 20 wpm. Our second grade class entered the year below the national average and has improved by a remarkable 73 wpm. This data is a testament to the diligent labor and ability of our teaching staff. We aim to continue and improve upon that work in the 2024-2025 school year.
Next year, we are excited to welcome a 6th grade teacher for our new classroom. Mr. Brendan Rowland has accepted this position and will be moving back to Ohio as he completes his graduate studies in Scotland. Mr. Rowland holds a master's in English Literature from the University of Glasgow and a bachelor's in English with minors in History, Creative Writing, and Honors Philosophy from Cedarville University. During his undergraduate, he studied abroad at Oxford University. We are confident he will be a great blessing to our students and to the school.
We are also excited to welcome Mrs. Lister as our pre-kindergarten classroom teacher and Mrs. Scott as our classroom aide. Our pre-kindergarten classroom will meet three days a week and is designed to introduce children to the culture of our school and begin training them in distinctly Christian and classical content. We will begin discipleship in the classroom through the study of God’s word and Christian virtues. The pre-kindergarten classroom will incorporate necessary fine and gross motor skill training. Instruction will also emphasize the development of necessary phonemic awareness and quantitative reasoning.
Our projected enrollment for next year is 49 total students. This means we are planning for an additional 26 students to our current student body. 14 of these additional students have already committed. This past school year, 75% of our yearly operational costs were funded by donations. With the increase in enrollment next year, our plan is to reduce that percentage to 50%. Our goal by year 3 is that we will only need to raise 20% of our annual operational cost and the rest would be covered by tuition. If we enroll 100 students, our school will be self-sustaining. We are on pace to get there.
Lastly, we would like to have our students participate in the Classical Learning Test (CLT). Standardized tests, like the CLT, allow us to test our students on distinctly classical content and provide us with an additional measurements for evaluating the academic growth of our students. The CLT will provide our test scores with comparison to other CLT participants, national averages, and they will specifically compare our school’s results with other ACCS member schools. This is a great way for our school to identify where we can improve and continue to better our work.
As we look to the year ahead please pray for God’s continued provision for our school. Please pray more families in central Ohio will hear about us and will choose to enroll their children. We know that if we labor in faith, it is God who brings the increase. Please pray that God would continue to bring a fruitful increase in the hearts and minds of our students and for Ancient Paths as a whole.
soli Deo honor et gloria