I am a goals centered guy. Most type ‘A’ leaders usually are. I have to constantly keep in check my own personal driven-ness towards some goal out there. Years ago, a close friend and mentor used to pick at me in friendly banter by saying, “you know Greg, it really isn’t about the destination, it’s about the journey.” This would frustrate me to no end. I would argue, “no way, you will never reach your goals with this mentality. We have to strive toward the goal.” I would then quote Philippians 3:14, out of context of course, that the Apostle Paul did the same. Paul’s goal and prize was to find himself in complete in Christ. Not the achievement centered goals I was thinking about. My friend was a very successful leader and businessman, yet he understood that the goals we set for ourselves and our leadership responsibilities should not define who we are. True success cannot be measured by numbers or accomplishments. The ancient words given to Joshua reveal the only measuring stick for success and it is a statement about the journey, not the destination. The Message Version paraphrases this well: “And don't for a minute let this Book of The Revelation be out of mind. Ponder and meditate on it day and night, making sure you practice everything written in it. Then you'll get where you're going; then you'll succeed.” Let me suggest that true success can only be defined by God and his Word. It is more about our relationship and obedience to Him on a day by day, minute by minute basis. If we will continue to walk closely with Him what is accomplished is a dim representation of this fantastic journey. With that in mind, let’s reflect on this journey and the possible directions that God may be taking us.

 The HCOS Journey

It was just four and half years ago that we seriously entered into this amazing direction of Distributed Learning. We began thinking about Online Education in 2003 inspired by a school inspection at Heritage Christian School. The inspection team had commended our technology programs with our campus students and recommend that we find some way to market these programs. In the next year we began exploring ways we could move into an Online method of delivering education. The following year we made a visit to Northstar Academy in Alberta, one of the first Christian schools to write online curriculum for Canada, and struck a deal where we could adapt their curriculum to the BC educational program. The day after we returned from Alberta, it occurred to us that we should begin to speak to people who might take advantage of this type of education. Of course we started like any good researcher and Googled BC homeschooling. The first page that hyperlinked to was a blog and some articles by Sarah Bennett who also lived in Kelowna. We journeyed a step further and found her phone number, to our surprise, she was home (duh, homeschooler) and she was willing to meet with us. This meeting was to define our journey from here on out. It was an important fork in the road. One direction was the road to traditional educational structures and Sarah’s road was to a whole new way of thinking about education. I will never forget her humble, yet firm demeanour when she quietly said, “I want to be a part of the best DL school in BC and if your listen I can help you become that school.” I thought, “I can listen, that won’t hurt too much.” She began to show us that we had very little understanding of whom we were trying to reach. She corrected many of our false assumptions and empowered us with a healthy dose of reality about home education, homeschool and what the new was in our Province. We not only chose the path she laid out we embraced her words as a prophetic direction from on High (we are charismatic after all).

That spring and summer we wrote policies, defined our processes, built our first websites and began to travel around BC meeting families and teachers. Our board gave us the go ahead with the provision that we start with at least 50 students. One board member asked, “what would you consider a successful start up?” I replied, “if we have 100 students, this will be an astounding success.” We set up our online enrolment system and before the end of June we had 120 students signed up. I will never forget sitting in the Learning Lane book store, in mid July, waiting to meet with some parents when I logged and downloaded the 200th application. I jumped up and shouted with joy in this little bookstore but slowly began to feel the pressure of this number. We didn’t have very many teachers at this point. Meanwhile, back at the office, we had hired some of our grade 11 students to take the Northstar curriculum and make it Web ready. Our campus school science teacher had totally rejected their science curriculum and was writing everything from Science 7 to Biology 11. I would encourage our web enhancers, one of whom was my daughter, and tell them every day this was going to work. They were nervous but thankfully they were too young to second guess their former principal. Somehow a team was coming together and the enrolments kept pouring in.

The summer of 2004 will stand out as the time of destiny. This became very clear to me when I met Janet Rainbow, another key architect in HCOS. She was recovering from a life threatening illness and met me in a mall in Campbell River. We had coffee, but more importantly we both had a sense that God was connecting our journeys together. Janet would become our key leader in the Individualized program that has defined HCOS. She arrived in Kelowna, with 17 other teachers at the end of August and we began our training with Sarah, Janet and myself. We had 350 students enrolled and every day we continued to see families join us. I would download applications during our training sessions and everyone would cheer. Another key person in this journey was our tech guy, Steven. He was a former student of mine (actually it was really the other way around but I try to keep this a secret) who we had hired three years earlier when he was in Grade 11 because of his tremendous computer skills. In 2004 he was at UBCO working on a Computer Science degree. He set up the enrolment program that also became our tool for tracking learning outcomes and just about everything else in the school. Without Steven we would have floundered terribly in the difficult and expensive world of online technology. We had dozens of conversations that could have passed as good script material between Captain Kirk and his chief engineer Scottie. I would say to Steve, “Encom has to do this” and he would reply, “Captain, the warp drive is almost ready to blow, I don’t know if we can give it anymore!” I would say, “We have no choice, the Klingons are ready to invade!” He would call back up, “I will push Encom but we won’t have any dilithiam crystals when we are done.” Etc. etc. Ok, maybe it wasn’t quite like that, but that’s how it sounded to most outsiders. With Steven’s expertise, Sarah’s philosophy, Janet’s strength and four additional teachers to make a total 22, we began the journey into the unknown frontier of cyberspace with 450 students in our first year.

The start up of our journey can be compared to a nice country dirt road with curves and a few forks but something new around every corner. That first year it began to feel like a mountain road with potholes, washboard ridges with curves and cliffs. In October the fellow I had sending curriculum and overseeing the online courses took another job. At the time only about ½ of our students had their textbooks. Our two high school enhancers were struggling to keep up with over 45 courses to transform and maintain. Our biggest hurdle was an inspection with the Ministry of Education that November. They were extremely surprised and concerned about our overnight success in enrolment. In a previous meeting with Susan Penner, the Chief Independent School inspector at the time, I shared with her that we had about 450 students and with a gasp she asked me to repeat the number and promptly blurted, “oh my, that’s too many.” I actually think she didn’t mean to say this out loud. Up until this year the Independent School branch had conducted a pilot project with 5 schools allowing 100 students each. In our first year we nearly matched all of the students in Independent DL programs. It was for this reason that Susan Penner schedule herself to do the inspection personally. She was tough on the teachers she interviewed but in the end she saw that we had built an excellent team and our technology was cutting edge. At the end of the inspection she called up the Minister of Education. She told him there was a school in Kelowna that had defined a process (Individualized) that supported home education and still maintained the BC education standards. After she finished the phone call she looked at me and said, “I knew this could be done.” What was one of our most stressful and difficult weeks became one of our greatest triumphs! We made it through our first year and, to our surprise, all but one of our teachers and three fourths of our families signed up for year two.

Year two brought both growth in numbers and influence as the leading Independent School in Distributed Learning. We started the year with 800 students and nearly doubled our teaching team to 42. We hired a new administrator for the grad program and online courses who was very helpful in bringing on the additional staff we needed. Training and mentoring the teachers became Janet Rainbows role and she began her next few years of life with a suitcase. We were given permission by the Ministry of Ed to begin to enrol special needs children and they would fund them the same as any other school. We started with six kids and this open a whole new frontier for our school. We started down this path the year before with a young man who had Asperger Syndrome. His mother came to us and begged to get him into an online program. This young man did not have the ability to perceive any social nuances or interaction and public school was eating him up. She found us through a neighbour and we agreed to take him on in spite of no funding. He had a stressful but successful year and God honour our financial commitment by giving us favour with the Ministry of Ed as well as the special needs community. This year (2008-09) we will be enrolling and serving over 70 special needs students with a budget of over a million dollars. In year two we hired another web enhancer and rolled up our sleeves to both write and rewrite our online courses. By the end of this year we had over 65 online courses filling out our electives in the graduation program. In year two we hosted our first Christian Home Educator’s Convention here in Kelowna. This was another Sarah Bennett initiative that turned into an overwhelming success. We invited Susan Wise Bauer and Dr. Jay Wyle as our key note speakers. We had almost 800 people gather in the spring of 2006 to celebrate, study and grow in Christian home education. We had over 70 venders and all six of the Christian DL schools represented. This conference and our school’s success began to move us into a leadership position in Online education and working with Home school families. Many of our families came to us because we were the best Christian alternative to the public distributed learning schools. We have continued to host this convention and this year’s was a great success with speaker Debra Bell and a dynamic youth and children’s program. Our numbers this year were 850 registrants and 75 venders.

Year three saw another dynamic turn of events with Online Education. The Premier announced new legislation in April that would allow any grad student in the province access to Distributed Learning courses without any cost. They specifically included Independent schools in the announcement allowing public school student to take our courses and receive funding. We had been developing a website called BC Online School where we were working with other schools using our curriculum. We set it up so students could enrol in all of our online grad courses and in the first year we offered our courses to over 400 students around the Province. Last year we reached 650 and this year we anticipate reaching over a 1000 students in 1500 courses. The amazing surprise was the percentage of public school students signing up for our courses. I had predicted many Independent schools students who would be interested in our courses but almost three fourths of the students were coming from high schools around the Province. Our teachers and HCOS students began to have a platform to minster to the lives of many of these kids. We hired Gord Robideau to manage this program and we know have one of the best reputations among Principals and Counsellors for the level of service we provide not just the students but also the schools and families of these kids.

Year three wasn’t all just roses and cherries; we had a cash flow crisis that put huge pressure on our non-profit society. We are funded retroactively for our educational programs. Therefore we have to carry our staff, curriculum purchasing, supplies, etc. throughout the year. The funding always comes in, just months after we have spent it. With the help of the Kelowna Christian Center asset base we grew to 950 full time and 400 part time students and hired 50 teachers. It was tight but we turned some huge corners.

Last year, year four, the journey continued into some amazing national and international opportunities. We continued to grow with 1120 full time and 650 part time students with a staff of over 60 teachers. But our influence began to grow as well. I attribute this to our Jabez like pray, “Lord, increase our tent stakes. “ We have started to receive international visitors, notably from South Africa, in November and Russia the year before. In Russia we have an amazing connection to a man that our office Director, Ted Gerk, led to Christ on a mission trip in the early 90’s. Len Stolyarchuk has used his faith to spread Christian education throughout the former Soviet Union and has invited us to work together with him to start the first Christian Online School in the Russian language. This summer I traveled with our Math Teacher Richard Bitgood and our Head Enhancer Christabelle Bitgood, (yes they are my kids but they are also the most qualified, it’s not nepotism if they can do the job better than anyone else) and trained 20 Russian teachers and web enhancers. We hope to go online with them in September 2009. ACSI had brought the South Africans to western Canada and they visited a number of Christian schools. We had an entire day with them at Heritage and inspired them to think about this as a means to reach into their very difficult educational situation in South Africa. I was invited this summer to a school that is working together with ACSI South Africa and will be launching a pilot for Grade 10 in January. We will be sending Sue Savard, our new grad program director and Christabelle to do more training in January.

Starting into year five we have already had to close our enrolment at 1050 K to 9 students, 200+ full time grad students and another 1000 part timers. I still can’t tell you where our will plateau. We are working in multiple countries and provinces this year and God keeps giving us ideas that seem to work in this new environment. We are looking at starting an ESL initiative that could reach the tens of thousands all over the world. Our projects in Russia and South Africa are the beginning of what could be a world-wide movement of Online Christian education. The Lord has been impressing on us to trust him for our involvement with a million children worldwide and this leads me back to how I opened this article. It is not the destination that counts but how we walk out the journey. We must stay true to His vision and integrity, we must eschew any semblance of pride for our success and accomplishment because the gifts and abilities come from him, the success comes from him and is defined but what he calls true success. Thus we are on a journey to be faithful to the Master and follow his hand through these uncharted waters. He knows where to go and how to get there so our prayer is, “just one day at a time, sweet Jesus.

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