As a vibrant part of our community Harvest Christian Academy has impacted our community on many levels. However by far our greatest success has been as a preschool.

 

Educating and even more importantly CARING for young children is our ministry. It is how we serve and make a lasting difference in our community and ultimately our world.

 

We have fed the homeless, led prison ministries and worked in foreign missions but what has more impact on where we all live and work is the mission of preschool.

 

I have often said ,“if you want to make the world better improve the lives of children”

 

Study after study shows that we either invest in preschools or prisons. As one of the most incarcerated nations on earth it is safe to say we have tried prison and it is not effective.

 

A Time Magazine Article By Maia Szalavitz June 09, 2011 shared these important statistics:

 

“After tracking the children to age 28, researchers found that those who had attended preschool were 28% less likely to develop alcohol or other drug problems or to wind up in jail or prison in adulthood, compared with kids who did not go to preschool. What’s more, their odds of being arrested for a felony were cut by 22% and they were 24% more likely to attend a four-year college. Incomes in adulthood of those who attended preschool ere also higher than those for the children who did not.

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“We don’t see these kind of results from routine programs implemented on a large scale,” says lead author Arthur Reynolds, director of the Chicago Longitudinal Study, which has now followed these children for more a quarter century.

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“Just funding preschool doesn’t mean it’s going to be effective,” he adds. “You have to follow the principles of quality.”

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That means having qualified teachers and providing a structured but nurturing environment. In addition to the quality of the program itself, another reason the Chicago preschools may have had such a large impact is that they helped parents feel that they were part of a community and kept them involved with their children’s school. This cut the number of parents who frequently moved their children from one school to another by half.”

 

Another article by Rod Gramer 06/20/2018 “Invest in preschool instead of prisons” Shared the following findings about children in Idaho:

 

Right now, 50 percent of our 4 year olds are not ready to learn when they enter kindergarten, meaning they can’t recognize a few letters, colors or sounds. The probability that these children can read proficiently by fourth grade — when students are expected to read to learn – goes down significantly. They are also more likely to drop out of school and end up in that new prison we plan to build.

 

Yet Idaho is one of only six states that spends no money helping children get ready to learn. Even though it costs on average $5,000 a year to provide early education to a 4-year-old.

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As a taxpayer, I’d take a $5,000 investment to get a child ready to learn and succeed in school any day over spending $20,000 a year to lock them up once they commit a crime.

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Funny thing about human nature, though — we often wait until a crisis, calamity or crime occurs before we do something. Or, as Chair Field said, “We don’t have the option to do nothing. We have to do something.”

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But what if we set more students up for success in school, work and life before we waste their talent and potential? Now that’s really doing something.

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Jim Zimmerman, the former President and CEO of Macy’s, once said: “It’s better to prepare children than to repair them.”

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Written by Rod Gramer, president of Idaho Business for Education.

Harvest Christian Academy has spent over 30 year investing in the lives of children. 

Our school has a 100% readiness rating for children leaving our program to enter kindergarten. As a state licensed school we offer a free voluntary prekindergarten program available at NO CHARGE to all four year old children in our community. We provide hot breakfast, lunch and afternoon snack for every child in our school. We care for infants up to kindergarten age children with a large percentage of our students being at risk children.

We have always aspired to make preschool and childcare available and most of all affordable.

We do this because we care. As an independent non-denominational church we do not have the financial backing of any of the large denominations, yet we do it because we know if we make the lives of children better we make the world better.

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Our school welcomes all people and we open up our care to people of every race and ethnicity regardless of their religious affiliation. 

We just want to help people starting the moment they are born.

In 2018 our church and school were both destroyed by hurricane Michael. We are now in the process of rebuilding the church but our school is operating out of a temporary facility on our property. 

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Our hope is to build a new school that will help us expand our care to make  preschool and childcare available to more families in our community.

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Any help to our efforts in The H Project (our new school facility) is greatly appreciated.

The H is for Harvest as we believe that too many hopes and dreams die inside of broken hearts. We hope to plant the seeds of hope in young lives believing that those seeds will yield a harvest of good lives to brighten our world.