Hello fellow educators, welcome to Podcast # 110. I want to start today with an update of the funding issue I presented in podcast numbers 106 and 107. We spoke about a motion that was presented to the BC School Trusties Association by the Cowachin Valley School District #79 on Vancouver Island. Here is what they asked all the public School Trustees to lobby the government about at the BCSTA convention last week. The motion read: "That BCSTA request the Province of BC to redirect the public money spent on private education to public education system starting with this upcoming Provincial budget." Surprisingly this motion was carried by the trusties in last week's meeting. So what does this mean for us here in BC? Let me suggest, if you haven't already listened to or read podcasts #106 and 107 to take the time to do so and become informed on the issue. This type of opposition to Independent School funding should be expected and we need a good defence of why it is important for our government to continue to give us funding. We just recently had a number of people visit us at our CHEC convention who were from Ontario and they were blown away by the quality, scope and affordability of our Christian Schools. Eleven percent of our students in BC are going to independent schools and we have to help our politicians see how significant this choice is to this population. Please take time to sit down and write a quick email to your MLA. I had the opportunity to spend an hour with our MLA, Norm Letnick as a result of this podcast and talk about what our schools are doing. He reiterated the government's commitment to Independent School funding to our convention goers but this is something that could become very fragile if we don't speak up. So, for those HCOS and HCS staff listening I am going to ask you specifically to take some time and write your MLA.

I am just recovering from a great weekend with all of our HCOS educators and many of our families. We hosted our 5th annual BC Home Educator's Convention and had well over 1000 participants come to our Church and School facilities to meet with each other, our staff, buy curriculum, learn about their noble of task of home education and be inspired. This was our absolute best conference yet.

I had a chance to give one of the workshops on the topic of goal setting. I entitled the session "Are you Discipling or just Home Schooling." In the first part of the workshop I spoke about my relationship with my own children and how Christine and I have worked with them in guiding them through their education. We take comments from the participants as well. The main message of this session was to inspire our home educators to begin to think about why they are home educating and to give them good goals that will help them to bring discipleship based Christian Education. If you are a campus school educator everything will still be very applicable to your Christian School experience as well. I did have to edit some of the comments of the participants so it may be a bit choppy in a few places. Also the quality of the recordings are not the best so please forgive us for the background static. So here is part one of my session at the CHEC convention:

Audio Only

I will continue my message from the CHEC convention in next week's podcast: Please email us your comments and thoughts on this podcast. Also, if you would like us to mail you a free copy of my book or send you the download link for the audio version of, Discipling This Generation for a Digital World, simply send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and let us know what type of an educator you are, home schooler, classroom teacher, school administrator, or interested parent. Please let us know how you heard about the podcast and, of course, please include your mailing address. Thank you for listening and thank you for your commitment to discipleship-based Christian education.