By Cheryl Ward
Head of School
Calvary Schools of Holland
A February 2025 Gallup poll revealed that 73% of Americans are dissatisfied with the public school system. Reports like these tend to garner responses full of unchallenged platitudes about what defines a valuable education: what’s working and what’s not working. But what actually defines a valuable education?
As we wrap up our school year, I want to walk out what undergirds our intentionality in four important areas of a Calvary education.
#1 – Intentionality in Science
#2 – Intentionality in Music
#3 – Intentionality in Athletics
#4 – Intentionality in Parenting
Read my introduction to this topic on our blog here.
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We are four years away from graduating our first class of students who will have completed a full JK–12 Ambleside education. As we have implemented a Charlotte Mason education over the past ten years, we have watched our quality of education increase with each passing year. Our science programming has been high on our list to grow and improve. One of my dreams, in coming to serve at Calvary in 2015, was that Calvary students would enter into vital scientific fields such as neurology, physics, and medical practice. That they would serve other people as surgeons and veterinarians, and solve human problems through sustainable ecology, autism research, and quantum computing. As I toured the local Gentex facility recently, I couldn’t help but notice how it is incorporating chemistry and physics into the fields of design and manufacturing, and wonder how our own graduates might take part in that work some day. I also think about how our own Arrowsmith programming was born out of one woman’s desire to understand her own brain, and how she used that knowledge to help others open neural pathways using neuropsychology and neuroplasticity. Many of our students are already benefiting from this important work of science. Science is alive, and, at its heart, simply involves understanding God’s creation in newer or deeper ways, and applying that knowledge for the good of humanity. |
What is needed to build a skilled scientist? First, they need the right exposure, knowledge, tools and training — and then they need to practice, practice, practice.
So at Calvary, we offer strategic scientific subjects, taught in specific ways, with skillful teachers — mammalogy, herpetology, ornithology, entomology, basic anatomy, physics, biology, chemistry, and advanced anatomy.
Calvary has been in a ten-year process of building better structures for hands-on science work throughout all grade levels.
Froebels, a hands-on subject used in junior kindergarten and kindergarten classes, teaches the basics of physics. Nature study, taught at all grade levels, provides exposure to and experience with animals and plants around us.
We have been increasing lab work as well. This is why we have owl pellet dissection and frog dissection in the lower levels and why we introduce skeletal and anatomical models in middle school. But you can see our expansion into lab work most significantly in our upper school science classes.
We have an incredible duo in our high school science department. The addition of Mrs. Bush to our faculty is an answer to a long-term prayer request. She has twenty years of high school science lab experience, and she is passionate about God’s creation in the mechanics of science.
Students need practice doing science, not just reading about it or making diagrams of it. When they work with chemicals or work with the blood vessels in a deer heart, they are developing their own mental and physical memory in science.
We want students to explore if they are called to be a veterinarian or chemical engineer. We also believe that every person benefits from exposure to scientific principles and practice regardless.
We don’t want to pigeon-hole teenagers into math brain, art brain, or science brain so early in life. High school is where we engage with many subjects — all parts of God’s creation — learning to wonder at it and then become deeply familiar with it.
All of this growth and development of our science program has been intentional. One of the reasons an Ambleside education is so valuable is due to the broad and deep exposure to a wide range of subjects, even ones which do not come easily at first. The difficulty will make them stronger and able to apply knowledge to other fields, even if they do not pursue science as a profession or hobby.
A valuable education is found in the whole of the experience taken together, which forms our students into lifelong learners who are able to pursue a life of meaningful vocation and joyful intentionality. Science is one important part of that whole.
In the coming weeks, I will be sharing how we have also been strategically and intentionally developing our music and athletics programs, as additional examples of what we believe make up the whole of a valuable Calvary education.
Cheryl Ward is the Head of School & Executive Director at Calvary Schools of Holland. She has served the Calvary community since 2015, stepping into her current role in 2021. Cheryl’s passion is transforming educational settings through the underlying philosophy, relationships, structures, and processes that support them. She has a bachelor’s degree in education and a second degree in Biblical studies, as well as a master’s of education degree. She has been an advocate for Charlotte Mason education, and an Ambleside affiliate, since 2009.