My love for this school and gratitude for this community seems to grow every year. As I look back on this year, we have much to celebrate and many to thank.
We expanded our school building last year, and this year we enjoyed a full year of this new space. No sooner did we finish this building expansion, we reached our building capacity once again! Our school has enjoyed unprecedent growth from 162 students in 2017 to 203 students this year. In addition, we made the decision to open a second Kindergarten class next year, enabling even more growth in the years to come.
In addition to numbers of students, our impact and awareness in the community expanded this year. We launched our Covenant U program, hosting sessions at the school on commonplacing, the role of beauty in education, Singapore Math, reading great books, Kindergarten readiness, and logic. We saw our parents gather together with Dr. Wylie in our humanities room to read Athanasius’ On the Incarnation around Christmas and Augustine’s Confessions around Easter. We also launched our Covenant Community Dinner with around 200 in attendance. Our community gave back in extraordinary generosity this year with over $100,000 raised for the annual fund, a $70,000 endowment gift, and a new bus! All of this has enabled us to purchase furniture for four new rooms, subsidize the cost of a DC trip, and build a classical Christian art gallery in the hallway.
This year Covenant became the first and only accredited classical Christian school in West Virginia. ACCS accreditation is not an easy goal. There are over 400 ACCS member schools in the country but only around 55 have earned the status of accredited from the ACCS. We celebrate this year, but it is good to bring to mind that the seeds for this school were planted years ago. Around 27 years ago, a group of concerned parents and community members read of classical Christian education and committed themselves to establishing such a school in Huntington. As we celebrate this year, we are indebted to the bold vision and grit of these founders of Covenant.
Our newly minted accredited status brings with it responsibilities and a calling. Most obviously, we need to maintain our accreditation. But more importantly, we now have a unique obligation to this state and to this community. We believe in classical Christian education. We believe it works. We believe it has the ability to transform communities and families. Our goal remains the same: to raise up a generation of Christian leaders and thinkers with a broad exposure to great books and great ideas and who possess a genuine love for Jesus Christ and serve Christ in a wide range of vocations. Accreditation is a sign that we are doing something right, but there is more work to be done. As we look to this future, we should continue to pray that God will bless this community of teachers, learners, and families and that through us God will bless Huntington and West Virginia.
Soli Deo Gloria,
Craig Hefner, Ph.D.
Head of School
