Hello fellow educators welcome to podcast #59! Today I am beginning one of two podcasts about Special Education. Over the past 15 years in British Columbia independent schools have been included in special education funding. The Federation of Independent Schools Association (termed FISA) has worked very hard lobbying our government to include this privilege.  In the first eight years we received 50% of the funding available to public schools, similar to our regular per student funding. But FISA made the case that special ed students whether in public or independent schools deserve full funding because the needs are the same. This change has made it possible for Christian Schools like Heritage to reach out to families with special education students. They can now, affordably, give their kids a Christian Education.

At Heritage we specifically recognize this privilege and have developed an ongoing program for the last 15 years. We have had, on average, a dozen children whom we receive funding from the Government to supplement their programs. In the first year we started our Distributed Learning School we were not allowed these funds. Nevertheless we have always had compassion for Special Needs students and families. We had a young man with Asbergers Syndrome enrol and we stretched our budgets to provide for his particular needs. God used him to help us see how unique a program we could put together for him. With the favour of God we were able to receive permission the next year to receive funding for special ed students in a DL format. In our second year Heritage Christian Online School had six funded students, the next year we went to 28, then to 48 and this last year we had 80 funded students. We have already applied for 92 students for next year and anticipate that we will easily enrol over 100 students in HCOS and 12 in our campus school. Our schools plan to employ or contract 10 special education teachers and an army of Certified Educational Assistance, Teaching Assistants, Therapists, and support workers to meet these kid’s needs. God has sent us some extremely capable people to lead these programs. We are blessed to have John Davies with us today. John is our Direction of Special Education for HCOS and has worked in almost every environment of Special Education from classroom teaching to running a company that provided support services to schools.  He has raised two sons who have had Special Needs one of whom has graduated with Heritage and gone on to college and his career. Here is the first part of my interview with John:

Audio Only

Thank you, John. We look forward to hearing part two of this interview next week. Please email us your comments and thoughts on today’s podcast. Also, if you would like us to mail you a free copy of my book, 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.