Discipleship Beyond Sunday: Churches and Education Choice

Nathan Sanders: Hi, I am Nathan Sanders, and I am a policy and advocacy director at EdChoice. I’m also the host of this brand new podcast series called Sunday School Choice, where faith meets education freedom. The intro to this, what I’m filming right now, is actually recorded after the podcast episode that you’re about to watch. It’s not magic. It’s not time travel. It’s just editing.

But this series, as I said, it’s brand new. It’s going to be focused on discussions with pastors, church leaders, school leaders, thought leaders, and the faith community in the choice world. And so we’re going to be talking about how churches can utilize school choice, how churches can start and expand schools as a part of their ministry, and many other things related to that. So we’re super excited about the conversations we’re going to have in this series.

This very first episode is with Pastor Tom Kakadelis. Pastor Tom works with EdChoice in the Carolina region. He’s a pastor, and he does outreach out there, just talking with pastors and churches about school choice, about how they can start their schools, how they can expand their current ministries. He does an awesome job, a lot of great work out there. So we’re super excited to have this conversation with him, and we look forward to many more.

Hello, everyone. My name is Nathan Sanders. I’m with EdChoice. I’m joined today by a friend, a mentor, and then someone who works with us here at EdChoice, Tom Kakadelis. Tom, why don’t you introduce yourself real quick?

Pastor Tom Kakadelis: Sure. Thanks, Nathan. Thanks for having me. I’m a pastor for 40, I guess now 44 years. I live in North Carolina, and I’ve been involved in the education space for probably about 45 years. My wife, very active in a variety of different capacities from the state school board action all the way down to the local school board in Mecklenburg County, and everything in between charter schools and so on. So I’ve lived education for most of our married life. And so I now have gotten involved with how churches and schools relate to one another in the context of discipleship and education.

Nathan Sanders: Yeah. And thank you, Tom, for that. Tom works with us at EdChoice, specifically in the Carolina region, North and South Carolina and a little bit in some other states, and just to do outreach for school choice and how school choice programs in various states can benefit churches and folks who want a Christian-based education. And so that’s a lot of the work that Tom does. And so this is sort of series is going to be about a lot of that work and sort of how we can help other states, other churches, other advocates specifically on this issue. And EdChoice is a national organization. We just have the benefit of having a large network of folks that do this and sharing insights and data that we have to push that. So awesome. Well, thank you, Tom, for that introduction. So to your introduction, to your background and who you are and the work that you do, I kind of want to talk a little bit about how you got here. What inspired you? How you got into sort of this outreach for churches, particularly when it comes to school choice? And so can you tell us a little bit about how you got there?

Pastor Tom Kakadelis: Sure. The genesis of it more, I think, centers around, I would say, probably 2000, 2015, 2016. I got first really interested in why pastors avoided any sort of educational component in their church formally outside of their regular Sunday morning, Wednesday night, Sunday night programs. Many of them had discipleship components. They had even after-school programs. Some churches had preschools, but not many of them had the equivalent of a K-12 sort of environment. And the ones that did were separate, kind of as a part of the church, but not really integrated as a part of their ongoing ministry.

But then in 2017, 2018, I began to see in North Carolina the opportunity to connect pastors over a variety of different issues and began to see and get to know many of the pastors that were involved. And so I began a network. I just started a pastor’s network. And then over a period of about five years now, I have accumulated a number of names and the interest of those names getting involved in the education space. And now there’s more of an interest as we see choice being a great thing in a variety of other spaces. Education was a great place for me to sort of land in this. And so the integration of those two things, the network that I already had and the need for them in a variety of places to utilize the resources that EdChoice had and others, but EdChoice primarily because of the research, the background, all of those valuable tools began to be a really good way for me to help those churches get into the education space. And many of them wanted to and just didn’t know how. And so that’s what got me involved in the last two years. It’s been awesome because now I not only have the ability to pull it in, but I’m also able to go under the banner of EdChoice into places where pastors are already gathering. From the Southern Baptist Convention to the Church of God in Christ convocations to the Assembly of God camps to association mission strategists retreats, I get to go all over North Carolina and South Carolina addressing those different groups with the resources that they need to be able to create, really, literally create a school within their context.

Nathan Sanders: Yeah, absolutely. And I love that you say that about sort of the timing of it all, right? I love how you talk sometimes about, I forget, it’s the 80-20-20 rule. Is that what it is?

Pastor Tom Kakadelis: No, it’s the 80-1 rule. The 80-1 rule is that children spend 35 hours approximately every week in a classroom. They spend about 45 hours a week and more on average on social media and the Internet, YouTube. But they only spend really one hour a week on average in a church house. And that 80 number compared to one creates this disparity that is very difficult to overcome when you’re trying to build a biblical worldview in your life. And so churches struggle because many of the children that go through their programs, even if they’re very, very active at the end of their high school careers, many times they lose those children to other teachings because their worldview has been inadequately shaped.

Nathan Sanders: Yeah, right. Yeah, I love that. I love that example. You know, as I’ve been able to work and travel talking to other folks, pastors and church leaders, I’ve been able to sort of echo those that they’re like, you’re 100% right. I mean, even pastors and those in the church who are in leadership or administration, they’ve seen over the last few years since, I guess, the COVID-19 pandemic that there’s a need, right? Parents through COVID, whether they pull their students out because they want to homeschool them or put them in a private school because they realized that the public system was going to be closed for a while and they didn’t want that.

But with all the terrible things COVID brought, they realized after a while, like they should not have been closed and they should have been reopened way sooner. Like we’ve seen a lot of those losses when it comes to literacy and other things in the recent NAEP scores. That was a bad thing, right? And so COVID was bad, but it also presented lots of opportunities for parents and churches to meet that need. Simultaneously, lawmakers in a lot of these states saw that need and said, well, let’s start working to create some school choice programs. And so that kind of segues into my next question, which is how have you seen just over the last few years, a lot of these school choice programs, particularly in North Carolina, where you’re based and where you work, benefit those institutions, those churches and those schools? Can you speak any to that?

Pastor Tom Kakadelis: Sure. It benefits greatly. The challenge for a lot of marginalized families and families that are operating on, many of whom, most of whom probably on a month-to-month basis. These are families that don’t have the margins financially to afford $10,000 or $15,000 a year for some sort of private education. The Opportunity Scholarships, at least in North Carolina now, provide up to $7,500 per child per family or in each family. So the opportunity for some that are in greatest need, they’re able to get a hold of resources that would normally be assigned to, the state funding would normally be assigned to their local district, get directed in some ways differently.

Now in South Carolina, it’s a little bit different. Theirs didn’t work out so well last term, and so they haven’t got it through. But they’ve remedied that, and now they’ve reintroduced legislation that looks like now will pass and will pass muster under the courts against their constitution. So they’re able to do a similar thing. In North Carolina, we have worked on this for many, many years. And over the last couple of years, we’ve been able to then get what we call Opportunity Scholarships. And the main argument against it is that it’s taking money away from the public school system. But what they don’t say is that that pot of money is a very different location. It does not come out of the regular public school system allocation. It’s a separate allocation, and it has a cap. It only can service so many families.

And so over the last two years, the legislature here has been able to get past kind of the barriers that go along with it and been able to marshal in this new opportunity for some of these marginalized families. So all families can apply for it. The problem, the difference is, is that all of them aren’t going to get it because the greatest need is at the top of the list. And so that provides a way for them to do it. So that’s why in North Carolina, we have a great opportunity in front of us because that pot of money is going to increase over the next few years, and it’s going to give more and more families the opportunity to do it. Now, that’s just with state allocation. That’s not the local funding. So the local funding is untouched. The state provides this out of a separate pot of, if you will, a separate pot of gold. And then the educational system, public educational system, is not impacted by it. In fact, it’s positively impacted because the student is not in the classroom. That means that seat is available for an incoming student.

They still get out of the, now we’ve discovered in North Carolina, you’re going to like this. This may be a number you’re not familiar with, but there are 57 revenue streams that go into one student’s educational financial picture. So you have to have a lot of understanding about all that to be able to know what a particular student gets. So what they’ve done is all these different revenue streams, federal, state, and other, all come together to form that particular child’s financial commitment. So in the state of North Carolina, it’s somewhere around $13,000 a year per child that is spent. That’s, there’s all kinds of nuances to that. But the allocation, the Opportunity Scholarship only provides $7,500 at most, and could go down as low as $1,000 or $1,100 per child. So it’s not a lot of money when you start talking about the cost of education. So, but it’s a great program and it has changed the landscape of opportunities for parents and guardians all over the state of North Carolina.

Nathan Sanders: Right. And I love how you, you know, you talked about sort of the fiscal benefits of what school choice could look like in a state, which is like you said, you’re paying less per student. They’re able to pursue that education that best fits them. So not only is the state saving money, but the districts and the federal money coming in as they’re allowed to sort of do more, do less with more, right? Educate less students with more money because those students are now, some of those students are now gone. And then also it’s what you said, not only does school choice fiscally benefit a lot of these state budgets, but it also in public schools, but it also helps the public schools academically and lots of studies that we’ve seen because they’re able to sort of have some of that competitive pressure and some of that heat on them to say, okay, well, you know, we may lose some students or we have lost some students. So let’s, let’s, let’s rethink how we’re doing some things. And so it’s sort of that school choice competition helps, helps rise all the boats there.

Pastor Tom Kakadelis: What I’ve often heard said is that if you have a parent whose child is attending a public school and the child is doing well, the school is good, and they like the situation that their child is in, they’re not going to turn to this program and go, well, my child’s doing so, so well, and I don’t want it. So I want to take my child and go to another school. They just don’t do that.

What we’re trying to do is help schools that help students that where the fit is not right because every child doesn’t learn the same. It doesn’t even mean that the district is doing a poor job. It just may mean that the parent feels that there’s a better learning environment for their particular child. And so what it does is it changes again and reinforces the, the, the, the basic, I would say one of the basic core values is that parents are responsible for their child’s education, parents and guardians, grandparents, whoever it is, they’re responsible for their own child’s education.

And by releasing that from the government and thinking it’s the government’s job to make sure that that child gets an education is, is a very different paradigm. And it sort of shifts back to what I would say is what it originally is, is that we get back to what the family is and what the parent’s responsibilities are. And then we help the parent make the best choice for their child. The public schools become an option. We hope the best option.

Nathan Sanders: Yeah. And in a lot of cases, these, these school choice programs are supposed to present opportunity. And so millions of Americans identify as Christians. And I think lots of Christian families where they’re trying to understand and identify their kid’s education, whether it’s one that they’re going to get or one that they are getting now, a big aspect of what they want in education is not only academics and not only safety, but the social aspect of that school is super important to where my kid can be at a public school. They can be making straight A’s, the school can be rated A, it could be safe, but there’s something going on socially with my student where I’m just like, Hey, like he’s, he’s not getting a Christian based education and his peers aren’t sort of contributing to that sort of Christian environment. And as a parent, and what’s many, what’s important to millions of Americans is that, right? Chiefly, I want my kid not only to make good grades and be safe, but also to receive a Christian based education with peers who are edifying to that, if that makes sense.

Pastor Tom Kakadelis: And it does. It makes perfect sense that the challenge for parents today is they have so many influences on their children. In the past days, it might’ve been the community that was the big impact or of the child’s social life, right? Now the entertainment world and the community is online and the impact and influence of others from all over the world now come to bear on that child’s thinking and beliefs.

And so parents are trying to shape their children’s worldview. They may not say it that way, but that’s what they’re doing. And they want to shape that worldview around certain basic tenants that they believe in many cases, as you were using the term, maybe for some, it’s very clearly a Christian perspective, but even if it’s not, that parent has the responsibility as well as the opportunity to shape their child according to the worldview that they think is best for their kid. And that has a lot of different components to it. And that’s why what we’re doing now is spending a little bit more time with churches, creating capacity for that to happen.

Nathan Sanders: That’s a great segue into sort of what I wanted to talk about next. So just because of the work that you’ve done over the last few years, working with churches, working with pastors in terms of starting schools, expanding their current programs, we may get questions from other folks in other states as we travel and say, well, you know, what do I do first? What’s the first step in starting this program or expanding my school? It seems like there’s so much to do, but we have the room, we have the bandwidth, we have maybe even some money to help do this, but we just don’t know where to start. Sitting there saying, Pastor Tom, where do I start? How can you help me? What would be your response to that?

Pastor Tom Kakadelis: Well, that’s a great question, because I think that’s exactly what they do. The pastor comes and says something about that, or maybe I’m in a meeting and I present the opportunity and say, have you considered expanding your discipleship ministry into a five-day program during the week that would look much like a school? And there are a number of options that you can take to do that, from homeschool co-op to a micro-school to a hybrid of some sort to a university model kind of thing to a full-blown K-12 program right out of the gate. But that’s not always possible.

We try to help, first of all, see what their thought process is regarding discipleship in general. What do they hope that their students and their school, their community, their local demographics can demand? Are there any other options in the community? So we do a basic demographic psychographic study and say, and I’ll just pose a couple of questions to them and ask them about why this might be an important move. And then at that point, we set up a meeting and then I have 38 questions that we have to address. It’s kind of funny, but it amounts to basically about an hour and a half with basic leadership.

Sometimes it’s church staff, sometimes it’s a combination of leadership within the church. And we sit down and talk about what does that look like as a part of your regular, ongoing discipleship ministry to children. And then I help them to see that it’s not going to take a whole other entity to accomplish this. You can do this within the mainstream of your regular, ongoing ministry of that church. And it could be a smaller church, larger church, but in the case you gave me, I’ll just give you an example of a church out east in North Carolina that I’ve met with. I’m getting ready to meet with them on Wednesday night this coming week or this week. And then during that meeting, it is the third follow-up meeting on two previous meetings.

First one was with church pastor and staff. And then the next one was with elder leadership and some of the people that went that would be a part of it if it was something they would like to do. And now they’re meeting with their core foundational members that want to help get it started. And it’s from that group that they will decide what kind of a learning model they will incorporate into their church. Now, to be fair, this church has preschool, and that particular situation would allow them to accomplish a lot because they already have existing leadership that will provide the foundation for them to move into this next phase, whether it’s kindergarten, first grade, second grade, or whatever it is. And it’s from there that we would talk about what are the kinds of obstacles that they will face.

So we’ll look at what kind of a model, we’ll look at their existing demographics, and then we’ll look at what are the potential obstacles that they’re going to have to overcome. Now, like a lot of things in ministry, and it’s true in business too, it’s always easier to get into something than it is to get out. And so you want to do a good job up front asking the right questions so you know what the best way is to evaluate what you’re doing to determine if you’re meeting expectations both for what you set goals to do and for what you think your customer, your parents, your guardians that will have their children there, what they’re getting.

And you have to have a measurement to do that. Build those things in, then we start on the process. It’s a brief pathway. It takes about six months to do. It could take a little less depending on what kind of model you want. If you want to do a homeschool co-op, you can do that rather quickly. If you want to do a micro school with a small number of children, you could do that rather quickly. But if you want to do something that is on the school calendar that has to be formulated around that, you do need to do a little bit more planning. It will all rise and fall on leadership. So that has to be the key. So those are the kinds of questions and the important subjects I think that would be necessary at the front end.

Nathan Sanders: Yeah. I think it’s so great and so important what you said about discussing different models to go with, right? Whether you’re talking to church leaders because there’s like a common misconception not only on Christian education, but just generally any type of non-public education, there’s this common misconception that every non-public school is this big, large private school that costs 50 grand a year and it’s only for wealthy folks and it’s just not true. The important work that we do on the front end when working with legislators is to make sure that school choice scholarships can be used not only for tuition, whether that’s homeschooling or micro schooling or any type of co-op program, etcetera, because the education landscape is changing so much and innovating so much and that’s bleeding over just as, you know, it’s just as common in the Christian education world that you see a private Christian school, but also a co-op that’s based out of a church that’s still Christian based, but it just looks different and that’s okay.

And so I think it’s so important to discuss now what different models can be used because bringing other folks from what education looked like 25 years ago to now, it’s completely different. So to that, speaking on school choice programs since that’s what we do and I’m curious to know, because a lot of times when we’re talking with homeschool that’s Christian based or even other kind of models that are Christian based, there’s some hesitation from leaders and parents depending on the school choice program because they admittedly say there’s some strings attached. It’s a government run program or quasi government run program and there are some strings attached and they’re right in some sense and that’s why the work that we do is, hey, let’s trust parents, let’s trust those folks and let’s not over-regulate this and let’s make sure that private schools, specifically Christian schools and Christian models are protected when it comes to beliefs and when it comes to their processes. And so I’m curious to know your thoughts just because of the work that you’ve done working with Christian based educators and churches on how you would navigate that question and that concern.

Pastor Tom Kakadelis: That’s probably one of the five initial issues that have to be addressed anyway, because I do think that as much as pastors do a tremendous job of shepherding and parents are acquainted with what the typical school models and because of their own experience, unless they’ve had something more creative or different themselves, everybody thinks that kids come into class at 8 o’clock in the morning, they sit down at a desk, they get given information to absorb, they take a break for lunch, they get more information to absorb and then they get recess and snack and they go home. And that’s what I think a lot of times what the typical idea of a school is and in a church, you don’t have to do it that way.

So there are a number of models and one of them is what I would call what we mentioned a couple of times and that’s the homeschool co-op. Basically what that is, is a collective of parents who have agreed to come together as homeschool parents and utilize each other’s resources, time and talent to contribute to each other’s child education, whatever those things may be. And they work together, they may have some mentors that come into that equation that are from the outside. If they do it in a church, they might do it as a part, the pastor may have a small part in their, maybe a chapel service that they might have once a week, twice a week, whatever. So that model is very common because there are a number of homeschool collectives, number of homeschool co-ops that are out there. Then there’s a hybrid model of that, that you can utilize both individual learning sessions within the church where you do have some structure for classroom and content and you might even have some experts, if you will, or highly capable mentors in those environments to help direct different age groups of those children. So they may help them very well and so they may want to have more of a classical education. So then you might want to include something like classical conversations or the 5C model that comes with a Turning Point Academy sort of model.

So you can incorporate different types of things within these structures. Then you can have a regular classroom model, right, which is they just go five days a week. The other kinds of ways to do it are, like I’ve been promoting with some of our churches, is to say you have a little bit more structure on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. There’s a morning session. Children usually do really much better in the morning hours in the learning environment so that there’s a lot that can be done in those things. Incorporate a chapel service as a part of their discipleship ministry of the church. And then they include in that even teaching mathematics and other structural things from using the Bible. They can do it. There’s a lot of ways to do that. And so they do that on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. And then on Mondays, they use it for remediation. They look at children and they say, look, there’s some kids that can learn, are just behind in getting into the system.

And so they’ll use remediation. Sometimes they’ll use some of the older children to help remediate the younger kids, which is genius, I think. It’s a great idea. And then also it allows for there to be, if there’s not going to be school on a given day because of a holiday or something else, then those Mondays don’t interrupt their regular teaching schedule, learning schedule. And on Fridays, they really emphasize the kinetic part of education, which is the hands-on type things, music, art, sports, and other things. So the church then gets to have a say in all of that. And many times the worship leader from the church can then weigh in on the music piece all the while training some of these young people to be part of their worship team, either both for children, for middle school, high school, and even for adults. So you can bring in other people that are capable in those areas to help instruct kids.

So we have more engagement with other volunteers within the church. So that’s where I want to get to with this, and that is the whole reason why we do it this way. And that’s because it is an extension of the discipleship ministry of the church, regardless of the model. And that’s what keeps the pastor engaged. It keeps leadership engaged. It’s no longer just Sunday morning teaching, or Bible study, or Sunday school, or a Wednesday night Iwana program or something else, which all of those things are good, but it is more contiguous in terms of their ongoing building of a biblical worldview in these children’s lives.

Nathan Sanders: Yeah, I love that. So I’m going to ask you one last question to wrap us up here. There’s a ton of other questions that I would love to ask, and we’ll eventually come back and talk again, and we’ll discuss that stuff. But my last question to you is, because of your experience with this, and because of your network of pastors and churches, what would be your advice to churches and to pastors who were on the fence about this? They’re interested, but they’re not so sure, they maybe have some anxiety on having those resources and the bandwidth to make that start. Maybe they’re praying about it, which is great, but what would be your advice if someone just says, I just don’t know yet? What would you say to them in order to encourage them, but also to really start to think about those things?

Pastor Tom Kakadelis: Well, two things come to mind. One is that I would talk with a pastor about if their church is aging up in a community where there is a younger crowd there, but they’re not reaching them. I would take a look at that situation demographically. I would look at it more as, does our church reflect the demographics of the community that we’re in? Because so often, regardless of the denomination of the church, the church is aging up, and their children’s ministry, high school ministry is not growing. And I would encourage them then to put more emphasis on building a stronger framework underneath their aging community by utilizing the tutorial skills of their older congregation to help with younger people that are in need of an alternative in their community that could possibly bring those young people and possibly their families into the life of the church.