Usually most New York Times’ pieces about anything conservative and (particularly) Christian gets reams of nasty remarks in the comments section. But a recent story on the rapid growth of private Christian schools drew a wider range of constructive responses.

I’m talking about Ruth Graham’s piece about a Christian school in an obscure corner of southwestern Virginia (drive west of Richmond, then head south) and how such schools are booming around the country in the wake of COVID-19 realities.

It’s a trend that a lot of us have seen coming. The key question, for GetReligion readers, is how the story handled the “Why?” factor looming over this trend. We will start at the beginning:

MONETA, Va. — On a sunny Thursday morning in September, a few dozen high school students gathered for a weekly chapel service at what used to be the Bottom’s Up Bar & Grill and is now the chapel and cafeteria of Smith Mountain Lake Christian Academy.

Five years ago, the school in southwestern Virginia had just 88 students between kindergarten and 12th grade. Its finances were struggling, quality was inconsistent by its own admission, and classes met at a local Baptist church.

The Smith Mountain Lake real estate market is the largest marketplace for lake property in Virginia unless you can afford expensive beachfront to the east.

Now, it has 420, with others turned away for lack of space. It has grown to occupy a 21,000-square-foot former mini-mall, which it moved into in 2020, plus two other buildings down the road.

Smith Mountain Lake is benefiting from a boom in conservative Christian schooling, driven nationwide by a combination of pandemic frustrations and rising parental anxieties around how schools handle education on issues including race and the rights of transgender students.

Homes in Franklin County, which includes Smith Mountain Lake, are selling at 35% above assessed value, so people are definitely moving to this exurb because, well, they can.

Everyone is working remote these days and if you don’t HAVE to live near a place like Washington, DC (about a four-hour drive to the north), why would you?

In the 2019-20 school year, 3.5 million of the 54 million American schoolchildren attended religious schools, including almost 600,000 in “conservative Christian” schools, according to the latest count by the Education Department.

Those numbers are now growing.

After a few more statistics on how Christian schools are indeed growing, we get to the “why.”

When the pandemic swept across the country in the spring of 2020, many parents turned to home-schooling.

Others wanted or needed to have their children in physical classrooms. In many parts of the country, private schools stayed open even as public schools moved largely online. Because many parents were working from home, they got a historically intimate look at their children’s online classes — leading to what some advocates for evangelical schools call “the Zoom factor.”

“It’s not necessarily one thing,” said Melanie Cassady, director of academy relations at Christian Heritage Academy in Rocky Mount, Va., about 25 miles southwest of Smith Mountain Lake Christian Academy. “It’s that overall awareness that the pandemic has really brought to light to families of what’s going on inside the schools, inside the classroom, and what teachers are teaching. They’ve come to that point where they have to make a decision: Am I OK with this?” …

In Virginia, much of the recent controversy has focused on new standards for teaching history, including beefing up Black history offerings. Starting next summer, public-school teachers in the state will also be evaluated on their “cultural competency,” which includes factors like using teaching materials that “represent and validate diversity.” School districts have also grappled with new state guidelines this fall on transgender students’ access to bathrooms and locker rooms of their choice, and rights to use their preferred names and pronouns.

I’d like to know more about those state guidelines and I wish there’d been a link to them.

Now, I’m going to go on a related news tangent here. Whatever Virginia has in terms of sex education mandates for its schools, they are nothing like we have out on the Left Coast. Here is a sample of the graphic stuff we have here in Washington state and a local TV station’s read on the matter.

Our governor, Jay Inslee, went to enormous lengths to pass at the start of the coronavirus epidemic, which I wrote about here.

There were a lot of unhappy folks who protested this curriculum. Those who couldn’t flee to places like Idaho took their kids elsewhere which may be part of the reason why the district I live in lost 1,500 students this past year. That 8% drop in enrollment has done a number on the funding that district gets from the state. Being that my area of Washington state is pretty secular, looks like all manner of parents — not just those, you know, intolerant Christians — are pulling their kids out.  

The Times piece mentioned the same phenomenon:

In Franklin County, public school enrollment has dropped to 6,125 this year from 7,270 in 2017-18. Over the same period, the number of home-schooled students in the district almost doubled to 1,010, including 32 students who withdrew after a new mask mandate was put into place in mid-September.

Although the district does not count the number of students in other schools, Kara Bernard, the district’s home-school coordinator, said, “We are losing students to private Christian schools.”

The Times piece concentrated more on parents withdrawing their kids because of critical race theory, as opposed to issues linked to safety, privacy and a family’s religious beliefs. According to this Newsweek piece, the Left is doubling down on its efforts to politicize social studies. Nationwide, I’m guessing people are withdrawing their kids even more on gender issues and the feeling they’re having transgenderism forced on them. I know one can’t write about everything, but I wish the writer had access to private school growth numbers in culturally blue states (the schools mentioned in the article were in red states or red areas of purple states).

 For instance, in Oregon, which has had the nation’s most stringent sex ed laws for public schools for several years, Christian schools are growing there as well. And if you read about the backlash two public school employees in southern Oregon encountered when opposing the state’s gender policy rules, you might understand why folks are fleeing to private schools. I can’t emphasize enough what a huge issue this out here. I know of one Portland family whose two girls — influenced directly by the sex ed guidelines mandated by the state — are on puberty blockers and proclaiming themselves “gender-fluid.” There are real lives impacted here.

Now for the comment section (for the Times piece). This one was most instructive, with people noting various other reasons why parents are fleeing the publics, including the general lack of discipline. (Having been a substitute for the past five years in three suburban Seattle school districts, I can definitely agree with that one). Most of the commentators were by no means conservative or maybe even Christian but they grasped the complexity of reasons why people are leaving public schools.

One mentioned over-the-top examples of pressuring teachers to conform, such as this attempt in San Mateo County to “deconstruct racism in math education” and “dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms.” (Note to anyone actually teaching math in that county; if you need a female mathematician of color as a speaker, I know just the person for you). But, seriously folks: Math?

Another comment on special needs kids rang true; the reason all those autistic kids end up in public schools is because the privates can reject them. The public schools can’t.

Here is another crucial news hook. There’s more going on out there than the creation of conservative schools run by evangelical Protestants. There’s the classical school movement (which involves Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians as well as Missouri Synod Lutherans, Reformed Protestants and other evangelicals) and those are also doing quite well.

I’m curious if religion is the main reason for fleeing to the privates or whether vaccines, masks, classroom discipline and the lack of PC mandates are bigger reasons. Also, is it only Christians who are part of this trend? I found two pieces, less than a year old, that talk about the growth in Orthodox Jewish academies, plus a very recent Wall Street Journal piece on the relatively cheap Jewish day schools in Florida schools being one reason why Jews are moving from Brooklyn to Miami Beach.

Noticing some of the sheer nastiness toward evangelical Christians in the comments affixed to Ruth Graham’s piece, I don’t hear anyone calling Jewish parents Neanderthals just because they choose a religious education for their kids. Sure, Christian schools are growing, but so are other ones. I couldn’t find any recent data on the 300 private Muslim schools in the country but I bet they’re growing.

The bottom line: Forcing kids out of school because of Covid made parents realize they had options elsewhere.  

I understand that evangelicals are a bigger chunk of the population and it’s easy to typecast them, but it only seems fair to note that other religious groups are making the same choices. When Orthodox Jews send their kids to Jewish schools, they’re lauded for preserving the religion. When evangelicals do this they’re often branded as intolerant.

Please, someone find a private Muslim school to report on and ask what the prevailing views are on race, sex education and transgender bathrooms. I’d like to see the comments section on that one.

FIRST IMAGE: From the feature posted at the website of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, describing the birth of another classical school project.