PROBLEM: Working mothers need a school that provides all-day supervision instead of 5 1/2 or 6 hours provided by ordinary schools. The working parent also needs a school that is open year around without closing for extended Christmas and Easter vacations and a long 3-month summer vacation.

SOLUTION: Grace Community Schools is open daily on a year around basis 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. with no closings that a normal working parent's schedule cannot accommodate. This is true in both the day care and the elementary school divisions.

PROBLEM: Today's students cannot read. National statistics, as published by Arthur Kozol of MIT, show that the national reading level has declined constantly for decades to where 3/4ths of today's high school graduates cannot read a daily newspaper, fill out a job application, or be considered functionally literate.

SOLUTION: At Grace Community, college begins at two. Instead of phony reading readiness, our students are taught phonetic symbols, so that simultaneously as they learn to speak, they also learn to read. Our typical preschooler reads fluently. Our typical 5 yr. old kindergartner reads on national standardized tests at the second grade level. Our brighter kindergarten graduates (like yours?) read at the fifth grade level. Our elementary students run off the statistical charts in many cases.

PROBLEM: Math scores have descended along with reading scores in America's schools.

SOLUTION: Instead of modern math, we use the traditional approach. That is, students are taught to memorize the basic facts and compute without the use of computer helps, so that they conceptually can function and understand without the confusion found in ordinary math instruction.

PROBLEM: Music instruction and also language rhythm as in poetry are for the most part not taught in America's schools.

SOLUTION: At Grace Community, all children are taught to read musical symbols at the same time they are learning to phonetically read the alphabet. Students are taught primarily to hear language and to see it secondarily, which is the reverse of methods used in other schools. Instrumental music instruction is available in the earliest grades of our elementary school system.

PROBLEM: Recreational time spent on the playground is unorganized and a time for students to be injured by unsupervised play or by brutality from school bullies.

SOLUTION: Because most students spend their spare time passively watching television, we use playground time to teach games. Many of them are old-fashioned games many parents do not know, such as hopscotch, jump rope games, and activities where students have the thrill of learning how to interact with one another without doing damage to one another. Incidentally, this sends children home with their clothes a lot cleaner.

PROBLEM: While a gifted student can still get a passable education in spite of an inferior system, it is impossible to be taught the values of the Ten Commandments, the security of the 23rd Psalm, and the soaring goals of the Lord's Prayer, because ordinary schools refuse to teach an objective standard of truth and error. As a result, students do not know how to keep employment contracts, wedding contracts, and fulfill their responsibilities to their families, especially their children. In short, because the spiritual is not taught students are programmed for failure, sickness, disappointment and poverty.

SOLUTION: Grace Community Schools teach the Commandments from the age of two onward and all the basics of Biblical Christianity found in the original creeds and confessions of the universal church. We do not teach denominational hairsplitting, such as how much water to use for baptism and our own private ideas about what constitutes a good or bad church. Instead because there is such a vacuum to fill with basic instruction, we leave that to the choice of church to the parent; but we insist on teaching the basics of Biblical Christianity.

PROBLEM: Increasingly, parents are reluctant to discipline their children or afraid to discipline their children, because uncertainty in the law over definitions of child discipline. For example, some liberals regard any discipline as abusive.

SOLUTION: Grace Community Schools use no physical punishment under any circumstances. Instead we use a time-out system and an elaborate system of rewards, prizes, and recognition that has the same effect for most children that the old-fashion negative approach once did. As a result, nearly every student in our schools is able to discipline themselves and honor authority as successful people must. We invite visitors to tour our schools and see the well-adjusted, happy and achieving products of this system.

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