DEAR WESLEYAN FAMILY AND FRIENDS,

I am deeply grateful that you have taken the time to read the Spring 2023 edition of the Wesleyan School magazine. Your continued interest in and support of our school is encouraging and inspiring as we strive to fulfill our mission to be a Christian school of academic excellence. As is always the case, as you turn through the pages of this magazine, I hope you will enjoy learning more about the amazing accomplishments of our students and faculty in academics, arts, athletics, leadership, and service. For our alumni, I hope you will enjoy learning what is happening on campus and in the lives of your classmates.

Spring semester can be a hectic time that serves as the confluence of many key events and processes in the life of the school. While we focus much of our time on the successful completion of the current school year, we must also prepare for the upcoming school year. This preparation includes engaging in the admissions and hiring processes, which will bring dozens of new families, students, and employees to our community.

Another strong season of re-enrollment saw retention well above the national average, and the admissions season brought substantial interest in the school with outstanding attendance at all admissions events and a robust number of applications, especially in kindergarten. This provides us with great encouragement as we look to a healthy enrollment in the fall.

While admissions and new families are the lifeblood of enrollment, the most important thing we do each year to strengthen the Christian mission of the school is hiring. Nothing does more to create the Christ-centered culture of our school than the living testimonies of the men and women we place in front of your children each day to serve as ministers of the gospel to the children in their care.

While we are always interested in hiring teaching candidates who bring years of experience and advanced degrees, those are not the only or most important qualities for which we look in a prospective Wesleyan faculty member. While we want every student to receive an excellent education at Wesleyan, what we desire more than anything else is that the Wesleyan experience would be transformative in the lives of our students.

Because we do not hire a textbook, a curriculum guide, or a computer, the most important resource we can deploy to educate the mind, body, and spirit are men and women who embody and live out the gospel of Jesus Christ.

My hope is that years after a student graduates from Wesleyan, he or she will look back and identify that the trajectory of their lives is different because of the time spent with the men and women of Wesleyan School who mentored, led, and loved them while building and maintaining healthy, long-term relationships. Our model reminds me of the quote from the journal of martyred missionary, Jim Elliot, who wrote,

“Father, make of me a crisis man. Bring those I contact to decision. Let me not be a milepost on a single road; make me a fork, that men must turn one way or another on facing Christ in me.”

May Wesleyan School always be a place that is known for being a fork in the road of the lives of our students and not simply a place that marks the time a child spends in our care. If we are one such place, we will be a place where God can use us as a catalyst for change in the lives God places in our care.

May God continue to bless you and Wesleyan School.

For His Glory,

Chris Cleveland, Head of School