The new Lutheran Logos Academy in Valparaiso is the latest attempt to bring a Lutheran high school to Northwest Indiana.
The other ones in Indiana are in Fort Wayne, Indianapolis and Seymour.
The Rev. David Solum, pastor at Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church in Michigan City, is on the board for the new school and sending his son as one of the first students.
The school is beginning with seven freshmen who will be taught at Heritage Lutheran Church in Valparaiso by an all-volunteer faculty.
Retired teachers, retired experts in a field and people working part-time are the people recruited to teach on a volunteer basis. All are from the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod tradition.
Northwest Indiana has a large number of Lutherans, perhaps not surprising given the high percentage of Hoosiers with German ancestry and the presence of Valparaiso University, a Lutheran school. There are Lutheran schools for elementary and middle school students scattered across the region, but high school is the missing gap.
Solum said a couple of families approached him and his wife, expressing interest in starting a Lutheran school and asking for their help.
Most of the families are from Valparaiso, which is also centrally located in Northwest Indiana, so that’s where the school will be located, he said.
“We’re starting very small, and even primarily with the families that initially came to us,” Solum said. “We’re not expecting a huge influx the first year.”
“In this case, we’re not trying to, nor could we even imagine to, compete with Valparaiso High School or even any other public high school,” he said. “We do feel like we’re filling a niche for certain families within our communities.”
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This high school will be radically different from a traditional public school.
“We are a hybrid school, which means we are not going to be meeting five days a week,” Solum said. Classes will be in person on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Students will be working on their own the other days.
“We are going to mostly have them bring lunch,” he said. Some Fridays, they might learn to cook a meal together.
“We’re hoping for Fridays to be a little bit more flexible,” Solum said, including bringing in a music teacher or an art teacher. “That might be our field trip day,” or perhaps a life skill module. The flexibility of Fridays would also allow students to learn about trades and skills.
Each day will start with Matins, a Lutheran prayer service.
It’s designed to provide students with a classical education. This year, classes include theology, Latin, anatomy and physiology, algebra, geometry and logic.
As a start-up high school, it is unaccredited. “We are hoping at some point to be accredited with the Consortium for Classical Lutheran Education,” Solum said.
‘I am hoping that we will be conducive to any paths,” whether college or career, he said.
Through teaching the liberal arts, classically speaking, “I want to hopefully instill in them a way of being able to think about things in life,” Solum said.
Whether you become a doctor, mechanic, theologian or any other position, it’s still important to love knowledge and have a broad-based knowledge of the world around you so you can interact with that world, not just in your profession, he said. “I see the classical education as helping with that.”
The logic and ability to communicate ideas are especially important now, Solum said. “If anything, we need good political discourse in this country,” and not only the ability to disagree but also to know why you disagree and why they believe what they believe.
“I think being able to be a good citizen of this country, a member of this community, a member of this country requires some of these intellectual abilities.”
Courses like American history will dig deep into the roots of American government. “Read your sources. Read your constitution, read some of your Federalist Papers,” Solum said. The students, including his own son, will be doing so.
Peter Krenzke, of Valparaiso, is sending his oldest daughter for the initial cohort.
“We’re really interested in Lutheran education,” he said. Krenzke teaches engineering at Valparaiso University.
He and his wife considered homeschooling their kids, who attend Immanuel Lutheran School in Valparaiso, once they aged out of the K-8 school. “It was a little bit daunting, the idea of trying to do everything on our own,” Krenzke said. They had planned to use Wittenburg Academy, an online school, before Lutheran Logos Academy was created.
“The integration of faith into the high school is really important to us,” he said.
Traditional public high schools are pushed to prepare students for a career, with perhaps a stint in college en route to that career. “For Lutherans, talking about vocation is about more than just your job; it’s about your calling in life,” Krenzke said.
“The classical side, learning how to learn, is a good way to put it,” he said. Students are prepared for whatever the future might hold for them. “Technology takes off rapidly, and you don’t really know what you’re preparing for,” he said.
The classical approach Lutheran Logos Academy is taking “ties you to some of the great thinkers throughout history,” Krenzke said. “They were scientists and politicians and theologians all wrapped up in one.”
Krenzke is a product of the public schools in Avon, Indiana. “I’ve seen that experience. I’ve benefited from all the things that public schools had to offer.”
“I definitely don’t look down on the public school option,” he said. But he also wants the benefits of a Lutheran education for his children, sacrificing some of the benefits of public schools to accomplish that.
The initial cadre of students has been getting together with other families before being blended together in the classroom. “We’ve had a few gatherings kind of informally just to introduce kids to each other,” Krenzke said.
The Krenzkes attend St. Paul Lutheran Church in Chesterton. “We’re coming from several area congregations, so we’ve gotten to interact with people we wouldn’t have interacted with otherwise.”
With bigger classes, students can have anonymity. They’ll lose that with a small classroom like the new school. “It can be more intimidating,” Krenzke said. “I suppose to have a small class, if a teacher asks questions, there’s nowhere to hide.”
Meeting just three days a week in person, “we have more of a collegiate model where there’s a lot more independent time for the learning,” he said. That should work well for his daughter, who loves reading.
The school was a dream for a few years, with families talking about the idea, but the actual planning began in earnest last year.
“It’s been about a year of very intense planning,” Solum said.
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“We knew we were going to start very small and intentionally so,” he said. “If we suddenly got an influx of 100 students, I’m not sure what we’re going to do.”
“We are a non-choice school,” which means the board isn’t planning to receive any government money. It’s funded entirely by donations and tuition.
The first year’s tuition will be $3,500. “That will help pay for the materials and any kind of school supplies we need and other kinds of costs that might come about,” Solum said. The church is donating the use of its facilities, so there’s no operating cost there for the school.
Solum’s church helped sponsor Duneland Lutheran High School, which didn’t last long. It had closed before Solum arrived in Michigan City in 2014. “It did not gain as much traction as I think they hoped,” he said. The recession didn’t help, either.
“I think at the time it did not have quite as much support from other families and churches in the circuit,” Solum said, so he’s hopeful this time will be different.
As the school grows, Solum said, the board hopes to hire a headmaster. Until then, however, “we’re such a small school at this point it won’t be such a huge deal.”
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.