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 | Calvary Lutheran Church Dear Members of Calvary, Below is a letter that was sent to the school families to help them understand the reasons for our closing of Calvary School... ------------------------------------ May 15, 2017 Dear Calvary Christian School Parents, I wanted to write you about the closing of Calvary Christian School. Let me begin by thanking many on our staff for their professionalism and for going above and beyond in preparing Calvary for our next phase! They have continued to prepare wonderful educational lessons for the students! Our recent Stanford Achievement Test scores show that we have been accomplishing the goal of providing excellence in education. I also wanted to thank the parents that have expressed care, concern, and compassion for the struggle our teachers are going through! It has been said that "success has a thousand fathers and failure dies an orphan." The closing of Calvary Christian School is a failure. A heart-breaking one for all involved. While some of the seeds of this failure were sown many, many years ago, I wanted to focus on the four areas that caused us to have to close. The first area was a historical one, we had kept the tuition costs lower than they should have been and were unable to fund a contingency fund. When we lacked funds, we simply had no more to use. The second area was a software issue that occurs when transferring numbers from Quickbooks to Excel. The numbers transfer 'statically' and the formulas get dropped. While everything looks good, problems can develop. This 'glitch' caused us to begin the year believing that we had ended up in the black by $60,000 last year. However, when a physical adding machine tape was finally run, we found that it was $60,000 in the red. Meanwhile, we had moved forward in our academic agenda of splitting out classes and hiring a new teacher because we thought we had the resources. When we should have remained the same or looked at combining classes, we went the opposite way. The third and fourth areas were both involving enrollments. Lower preschool enrollment than projected caused us to struggle to break even in an area that normally provided a surplus. Changes in the visa program for our foreign students meant that we did not get the minimum of 10 we had been promised. Our foreign students paid a premium Tuition fee. This enrollment shortfall meant a loss of over $100,000. These four areas meant that we were deep in the red with no contingency fund to draw from and this spelled our end. To be crystal clear! There was no mismanagement of funds. There are no funds unaccounted for or missing. There was simply not enough tuition coming in to cover our expenses. The members of Calvary Lutheran Church had borrowed money twice in the past 4 years to keep the school running! Taking out loans of $240,000 to invest in your students education. Please remember the members of Calvary who will be continuing to pay for their mission of educating your children for many years to come! I and the members of Calvary want to thank you for the privilege of your entrusting your most precious gift to us! I also wanted to invite you to join us on Sunday morning at 9am for Worship. This Sunday, May 21st, Calvary will be acknowledging and thanking our teachers for their faithful service! You are welcome to join us to thank them as well. Yours in Christ, Rev. Kelly Smith Sr., Pastor |
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CALVARY LUTHERAN CHURCH & SCHOOL, 17200 VIA MAGDALENA, SAN LORENZO, California 94580-2928, United States
