The south entrance of Greenwood Christian School, located northeast of Averitt Road and Worthsville Road.
ANDY BELL-BALTACI | DAILY JOURNAL
Greenwood Christian School officials will break ground Thursday on a multi-million dollar project that will add classrooms to handle the school’s growing waitlist.
With the $2.4 million project — paid for by tuition dollars in reserve funds — school leaders will extend the academic wing northeast into an empty field. The property was already owned by the school and Greenwood Christian Church, which share a 108,000 square-foot building northeast of Averitt Road and Worthsville Road. The academic wing, located on the northern end of the building, will expand by 13,000 square feet to include six elementary school classrooms and two more large bathrooms. The renovation will be done in time for the 2024-25 school year.
The renovation will also include upgrades to the existing wing, with repainted walls, and carpeting in hallways replaced with laminate. Half walls in the infant area will be removed to create a more open space, said Vince Matthews, chair of the school management team.
Although Greenwood Christian School was founded more than 50 years ago, the building it occupies now was built in 2000, said Adrienne Leech, Director of Operations.
The school currently has 15 daycare classrooms, two classrooms used for preschool and PreK and eight elementary school classrooms, said Ellen Sheets, an administrator for the school.
Greenwood Christian School offers preschool and daycare programs for babies and toddlers and schooling for children in kindergarten through fifth grade, but demand for services, especially at the daycare level, has grown. There are 130 students in the elementary school, and offerings will expand to include 150 during the 2023-24 school year.
The elementary school has a waitlist of less than five students in all classes except first and second grade, which don’t have a waitlist. In daycare, however, the situation is more dire. There are 204 children in the daycare and preschool program, with about 200 on the waitlist, Sheets said. These renovations will allow school leaders to accommodate all waitlist students for the elementary school classes and 40 additional daycare and preschool students, she said.
The school will be able to serve additional children in daycare by moving elementary school students to the new rooms created by the renovation, which will each serve 25 to 30 students. With the new classrooms, 11 new jobs will be created for daycare and elementary school employees, Matthews said.
While the building shared by the school and the church is large, the rest of the building is used for Sunday school, offices and church meeting rooms, which can also be rented to the public. With the renovations, the school will be able to give two rooms back to the church it was using for elementary students, he said.
While the renovations won’t be able to serve everyone on the waitlist, it will help accommodate more children, said Jennifer Cochran, a fourth grade teacher at the school.
“This will allow more families to experience Greenwood Christian School and what we have to offer,” she said. “We have more space we can offer to more kids in our community and families wanting a Christian education for their kids.”
The school serves as a viable option for parents who want an alternative to public school, said Scott Pitts, children’s minister.
“Parents are increasingly longing for more discipline, a better education and a different vision for the curriculum,” Pitts said. “You see on the news, people showing up at school board meetings wanting something different than what some public schools are offering. We have families who are not necessarily of the church tradition or church-attending but like the structure and our reputation for academic excellence.”
