Wednesday Inventory

There seems to be something in the air and I really do not know what it is.  There is plenty of good news to go around.  Enrollment numbers across the conference are significantly up from last year.  That means that parents are making a renewed commitment to invest in their children’s future.  That’s exciting.  But there is a dark lining to this particular silver cloud (I just made that up!).

We have an unfolding crisis unfolding in Adventist Education that has been developing for years but we have left it alone perhaps hoping that more students would solve our problems.  It will not happen, in fact, it may make our malaise even more severe. 

Let’s move beyond the challenge of the shift by many of our parents to a “cost” over “value” assessment of Adventist Education.  In brief, if cost if what is the basis for considering education in our schools, the cost will never be low enough to warrant a decision to enroll a child.  We will have to continue to lower and lower tuition to convince them to grace our schools with their children.  Our challenge is to highlight the value of Adventist education.  Once that is established, then cost is inconsequential, since people find a way to acquire things they value, regardless of the cost.

But there is concurrent problem gnawing away at our system.  Ironically it has to do with cost, i.e., the true cost of education.  In Arizona, the government has realized that it can actually save money by giving people the option to redirect their state taxes to private schools and have them educate the children.  While our schools continue to cut tuition to make enrollment more attractive, the cost of education continues to rise.  Thus as tuition rates hover around $4,000 per year at the elementary level and $8,000 at the high school, the true cost of educating those very students is closer to $10,000 and $15,000 respectively.

This “true” cost of education is what it takes not simply to survive one more year, but to truly fund the cost of a thriving school, with sufficient staffing, resources, and facilities to meet the needs of the student body.

Add to this that even the tuition rates are heavily leveraged by church subsidies, conference and union scholarships, tax credits, and the like.  Thus the actual liquid funds available to a school to meet its baseline expenditures can be regularly tested and often exhausted.  The cost of rescuing the schools from these times of deficit spending falls upon the local churches or the conference.  But remember that this is intervention is simply to assist the school to reach the tuition rate and not the true cost of running a school.

Unless we rally as a conference family and formulate and new paradigm for funding Adventist Education (Evangelism funds for instance or a redistribution of tithe funds sent outside the conference) and/or milk the tax credit dollars before they disappear, we will certainly experience the ultimate closure of more and more of our schools.  The local churches can no longer carry the burden of sustaining the schools in areas where socio-economic and generational shifts have taken place thus altering the support system that existed in those places a mere 30 years ago.

We are going to have to get serious about this challenge.  Prayer must become our first priority at home, at school, at the churches.  The schools must be returned to the front burner of our mission as a church.  We are losing our young people at alarming rates—this rate will only increase as larger and larger numbers of our church children receive their education outside of the Adventist system.

You probably weren’t expecting this treatise when you came to this website.  It is where I was tonight as I pondered and took inventory of the state of our schools in the Adventist system in Arizona and beyond (North America and Europe).  Pray hard!  (221.2)