31 Jan 2023 Ready to soar

Posted at 7:20 PMh in Features by

By Dwain Hebda

If there’s any doubt of the allure of faith-based private education in Arkansas, entering the halls of Conway Christian will set that view straight. 

The school recently opened a major expansion to its campus in the form of a 30,000-square-foot, multi-use high school addition that touches academics, the arts and athletics.

Photos by Mike Kemp

“The high school has an academic wing that features a brand-new science lab and other classrooms,” said President Jason Carson. “It also has a drama room and art room for fine arts with a kiln and printing press. All that’s adjacent to a brand-new auditorium that’ll hold about 650 people with stage, lights and visual screens.

“It also has an athletic wing that features a 2,000-square-foot weight room with brand new equipment, brand new locker room and coaches’ offices.”

Discussions for the space began several years ago, Carson said, partially from an increase in enrollment and partially to address areas of need.

“When I first got here, we did a strategic plan and we looked at different areas of the school that needed to be addressed,” he said. “What we realized was, first, we had really strong arts and athletic programs, but the space in which those programs operated was not ideal. We wanted to figure out what could be done with that.

“Then, we’ve gone from 470 students three years ago to 600 students this year. We saw that putting a pinch on our lower school especially. This new facility is going to give us the opportunity to grow closer to 800 students.”

The new high school was put into service immediately upon completion, just before the midterm.

“We had our very first event in December 2022,” Carson said. “It was an event for all of our junior high and senior high students to kind of kick off the building dedication. Then we had a couple of choir concerts in December, and the student body started using it when we returned to school Jan. 9.”

Funds for the new school, which came in at a total cost of about $7.5 million counting furnishings and equipment, were received via a capital campaign kick-started by a generous matching donation. Carson said that gift, along with the response from the entire Conway Christian family, was an endorsement of the school’s mission and core values.

“We were able to get an anonymous donation from a foundation. They gave us a $2.5 million matching gift. That was August of 2019,” Carson said. “We launched the campaign and raised roughly $600,000 to $700,000 and then COVID-19 hit, so we had to stop and focus on the pandemic. By October or November of 2020, we relaunched the campaign and raised all the funds required to build the building by late last year, 2022.

Former Board Chair Arnold Hameister, Conway Christian School President Jason Carson and former Board Chair Randy Lewis are proud of the new, state-of-the-art facility. The men are excited to see high school students enjoy the new building and to see the growth it will allow in all grades. Carson said that Hameister was Board Chair when he was hired in June 2016. At that time, the new facility was a vision that the Board and school leaders were planning toward, and Carson was hired to bring it to fruition.

The high school also ushers in a new three-tiered organizational structure for Conway Christian. Founded in 1992, the school was previously comprised of a lower and upper school that split between sixth and seventh grade. Going forward, the lower school will house prekindergarten through fourth grade, a new intermediate school serving fifth through eighth grade will be housed in the former upper school space, and the newly constructed high school will serve ninth- through 12th-grade students.

Carson said the new three-school format, combined with the physical amenities, will also serve as a potent recruiting tool, accelerating what is already in high demand in Central Arkansas.

“There’s a lot of opportunity in private Christian education in Arkansas,” he said. “What we’re seeing across the whole country — with the way society has changed over the last four to six years — is there’s a lot of families who want a Christian, faith-based education. At the same time, they have expectations for nice facilities, teachers who are well-trained and certified, and that their kids are going to be prepared to go to college or whatever the future holds as far as a profession.

“If we want to keep growing, we’ve got to offer a product that’s as good or comparable to the local public schools, the local private schools we compete with, the charters and the home-school options. We want people from the minute they drive onto our parking lot to the minute they walk into our buildings and engage our students, our teachers and the classrooms, we want them to go, ‘Wow!’ Any way we can improve on that is going to help us maximize the opportunity that’s out there to keep moving forward.”