The Tipping Point

The summer is fading away and a new school year is dawning. The time is here for families to gear up for another year and as we do this – I am reminded of the incredible financial sacrifice that every family makes to send their children to ACS. Its times like this that we reflect on the reasons for why we believe in Christian Education and why we trust ACS with our children (and our money). Be sure to read the “Why We Do What We Do” articles in each of the messengers to find out slices of this.

With a little more time to read over the summer, I read a book entitled “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell. It is a book largely devoted to the marketing of products and examining why things get “big” or why epidemics happen. An interesting read and I recommend it. The central theme in the book was focused on investigating when products or epidemics become renowned or take on epidemic status. Gladwell suggest that there are always tipping points to these phenomenon’s. The book fascinatingly portrays the research along these lines. As I read the book and was captivated by some of the stories, I wondered about new families at ACS and when the “tipping point” happened for them, and what it was that had them deciding that ACS was the place for their children. Gladwell would argue that it’s often a person (a family friend, a current or former teacher acquaintance, a pastor who knows the school well)that connects families to the school, or maybe it’s a program that people have heard about that attracts them (like music and art or athletics and drama). Perhaps it has to do with a program that is specific to the needs of individual students (like Special Education, or English Language Learning). It can also be external expertise that has painted positive pictures of our school that carry clout; for example the Fraser Institute has ranked our secondary school as the top academic high school in Abbotsford this past year (for the second year in a row), and in the top 20 in the province. Gladwell also touches on the context of people’s lives – which I tend to think (and hope) is the main driver for why people choose ACS. In our context, for the most part, we are convinced that God is calling us to a place that our children are engaged in Christian learning, and we entrust our children to the school to educate them along the lines of what the school says (see our Mission Statement on the front of the Messenger). I’m curious (especially as a new family, or a relatively new family) what was your “Tipping Point”; what was it that, had you decide that Abbotsford Christian School was the best school for your child or children? I would love to hear your responses.

For those of us who aren`t new to the school, you will recall that we canvased all school-parents towards the end of last school year to get feedback in the form of a parent survey. The end of the school year marked the end of the surveys and as such we are finalizing the results of the survey and look forward to sharing the results throughout the course of the school year, and then also communicating our responses to what parents are saying about the school and what types of changes we are implementing to be better at what we do, based on your feedback. We truly appreciate the time that was taken out of your lives to fill out the surveys and are grateful that we now have abetter sense about how our parent community feels about the school. We also did this with our staff last year and plan to do this with targeted levels of students this coming year. As you know, the surveys reflected our strategic plan and, therefore, they have been invaluable in providing feedback towards whether or not we are accomplishing our initiatives in the plan. We are also setting out to communicate with you regularly on how we are doing in regards to our strategic plan, and you will see regular updates in the Messenger along these lines. Finally, in keeping with an initiative in our strategic plan, we are seeking to become more electronic in our communication. In January, we plan to switch the Messenger to an electronic format for all parents (our Honorary Members will continue to receive a hard copy). We realize that this is a major shift for many of us, and we want to be sensitive to this change so we will also parallel the Messenger in hard copy to all parents who desire to continue to read the Messenger in hard copy format. Parents need to indicate that they would like a hard copy – otherwise we will assume that they prefer it electronically. We are confident that we have updated email addresses on file for all of our parents and look forward to using this new method of communication. We also look forward to the interactivity that electronic communication could afford (notice that this article is also a blog) and could open up new opportunity for people to correspond to articles written through blogs and wikis online. Many people have commented that not only would they like to receive the Messenger (and other school communication) electronically, but they would love a seamless opportunity to respond to articles written in somewhat of a public forum.

Please feel free to comment on any of these issues or share anything else on this blog. I will explain the name of the blog in a different blog post.
Julius Siebenga -Executive Director