Shaun Newman Podcast - #589 - Deanna Franklin

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

She is one of the founders of Shine Christian Academy. We discuss where the idea came from, the early days of homeschooling and expanding to Lloydminster.  Let me know what you think. Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcastE-transfer here: [e-mail] Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Phone [phone] – general sales line, ask for Grahame and be sure to let us know you’re an SNP listener.

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Franklin. So buckle up. Here we go. Well, welcome to the Sean Numa podcast. Today I'm joined by Deanna Franklin. Good morning, Sean. Thanks for coming in. You were asking before we started, and I'm just, this is the morning it's going to be. You asked, am I surprised at where it is the podcast? Right.

And when I first started, I wrote out my goals. And I was like, if I could be full time by year five, I think that'd be incredible. And I can't remember what book I read, but they were talking about businesses, most businesses, don't last five years and they have all these different years. I'm like, okay, if I could be a business by five years, that'd be pretty cool. And so year one, I was like, we're not going to worry about money. We're just going to worry about, you know, trying to get the reps in, trying to get some interesting people on, trying to figure out if I like this.

And I thought, you know, if anybody ever comes to me and says, hey, I'd like to, could I sponsor? Like, could I get on that? Could have we put an ad? Then I know that I've got something that people are interested in. My biggest fear at the start of this was my voice. I was like, if I have that voice that nobody wants to listen to. which there's probably people out there that don't like listen to me. Then I'm like,

then I'm, I was just quick because I don't know how to alter my voice. I don't really talk in a different voice when I'm not on this thing. And that wasn't the case. Jeez, I sound like burning my own ear drums here. And so year one, I got my first sponsor. They can't approach me.

And after that, I started like pushing a little bit. And, you know, like, so they always say, you know, you set your, you know, set your course, point towards something. And you'll be amazed if you just start moving towards it how quickly you get there. And by year three, I got to go full time. Now, that was a bit of a shock to myself and everything else. So when you say, are you surprised? It's like, well, no what to start. I was like, man, if I could do this full time, I think at times I'm a little interested or surprised at where this thing has taken me. Less so on like the fact that I get to

sit across from all these wonderful people and have all these interesting discussions. That isn't the surprise. The surprise is like, you know, if you told me at the start that I was going to stray away from sports and community pillars to politics, faith, COVID, every conspiracy under the sun, and just have open dialogue, and that I would really enjoy that. And by, you know, all accounts, the audience really enjoys that, that's probably the surprise. Yeah. I can relate just with the school, starting out having an idea and then seeing where we're headed in year two. It's, yeah, it's pretty cool to see the growth and just what the plans are.

Well, tell me this, you know, there's going to be a ton of people, right? We've got people all over the place listening to us, right? Certainly Lloyd, I hope, we'll tune in. But then you're going to have all of people from all over the place. And they're going, okay, who's Deanna? Who is this lady? Tell us a little bit about yourself. And then if you don't mind, well, and then I'll ask how you get into the Shine Academy.

Okay, sure. So I'm just a regular mom, wife. I've been married just about 13 years. I have two daughters. One is 18 and one is 10. I grew up in the Lloyd area. I moved away for college. And what is the Lloyd area mean?

Do you mean in Lloyd or you mean on a farm? Yeah, just on an acreage outside of Lloyd. We always had horses. And before we'd moved to Lloyd, we lived in small town, Saskatchewan. What small town, Saskatchewan? Watson. Watson. Yeah.

Yeah. My family. I actually know where Watson is. So I've actually heard of that one, you know. You got to ask, though, where is Saskatchewan? Because we all know there's like, what was the guy saying today? this morning it was Liberty. So he was from Liberty, I believe.

And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah. Like, no idea where that is. Okay. Anyways, Saskatchewan's great for that. Yeah. So anyways, yeah, we, I guess we moved to Lloyd when I was 12. And then my parents bought an acreage here. They switched jobs.

My mom had transferred. So I grew up going to ES Laird, going to the comp, made great friends, great connections growing up here. moved away, went to college in Medicine Hat, tried living in Edmonton for a little while, and eventually ended up back here with my oldest daughter. A few years later got married, and we lived out by Lee Park for a few years, and now we're Kit Scottie. What did you?

What did you? What did you? I love it. Love it. Yeah. Because Lee Park's probably got the most treacherous bridge in the area in the area in the winter time. You're like, please don't go down that road, right? It does anything like it's been doing. Like, like, you know, it's been this wild winter this year. And all it takes a little bit

ice on that corner and you're like, nope, don't want to go that way. Don't know how many times I've met a semi going, coming at me from the other side of it and been like, well, this is the worst possible place to be. But other than that, it's like gorgeous. It's beautiful. I miss the drive. We had to cross the bridge every day. It was fine. You get used to it. You slow down. but yeah that was it was beautiful living out there so we ended up buying an acreage just between kit scottie and marwain about five years ago and just as we had moved that was 2019 we were just getting the kids kind of settled into kit scotty school and then 2020 happened and my kids were stuck at home and it was an odd time as everybody knows um

Yeah, so as we made it through 2020, 2021. What age are your kids? Back in 2020, sorry. What's that? Four years ago? Correct. Yeah, so like 12 and six. Okay.

Yeah. My youngest one really struggled, actually, because she'd just moved from Marwain school to Kit Scottie and then got stuck at home and really didn't have a group of friends. Yeah, compounded. Right. So anyways, that was all very interesting. One night my husband and I were just talking like, what do we do?

Like, how do we send them back to school with all this chaos and all that kind of thing? Yeah, I just, I said to him, there's got to be something. Like, homeschooling's not an option. I work four days a week at Michigan Environmental. Shout out to them. To Tyson, yes. To Tyson and Tracy. And my husband works in the oil field and as you know there's no schedule to you know those jobs.

And so I just wasn't sure what the path would be for us. So we did put them back in school. And as time went on, there was just something stirring in me. You know, more and more craziness kind of was starting to ensue outside of the masks. Yeah. So anyways, that's kind of where Shine started to formulate, I guess. I wasn't really sure on what it was all going to look like. But I had reached out to a private Christian school in Calgary and I was like, what do you do? Like, tell me about this. How do you do? How do you do what you do? How do you get started? Back then when you reached out to the place in Calgary, were they doing no mask, man? Were they doing any of that? Or was it just the Christian foundation that appealed to you?

At that time, it was the Christian foundation that appealed. I wasn't sure. I never did ask them if they were, you know, following all. Yeah, all the protocols. I think because of the size of their school and some of these other schools, it was kind of considered a cohort. So you could work around some of those things. What size of school?

Was it? Like, how big was it? I'm not sure what they had. I know now they're close to 100 students and this is like their third year. But for a Calgary school, relatively small. Oh, very small. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So I had Rob Martin come down and just do a community meeting in Kit Scottie. Like, tell us what you do. Like, I just need to see if there's any interest, you know, in this area. And I know that this area has. strong faith and that there were a lot of people standing up just against, you know, all the insanity that happened. Against Jason Kennedy, Premier Moe, Justin Trudeau calling us a small fringe minority, although that was late in the game. Yes.

Yeah. Well, you know, we attended a couple protests here in Lloyd and that was new for us. For sure. It was new for everyone, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah. What an odd feeling. It was so crazy, but to take the kids there and to feel the love and the excitement to just, you know, be around one another, that was pretty cool.

So, yeah, I knew that there would be interest anyways and kind of what I was thinking. So, yeah, that meeting, I think there was about 30 different families that attended. And some right away were like, ooh, Christian background, no, you know, other ones, oh, we have to pay for. for school, no, which is fine. So our meetings, we had a couple more meetings and the group kind of got smaller, which I was worried. I was really worried. I was like, okay, so this isn't, maybe this isn't going to happen. Maybe I just need to find a few families to do like a pod, you know, and we just kind of rotate whose house they're at or whatever, because I don't work Friday. So I was thinking, you know, I could always host on a Friday or something.

Anyways, it's pretty cool when I look back and I see how God brought the right people. And that's my board now. And we have become a family and a community and spend so much time together and work really, really hard at growing shine and now this opportunity, you know, to open up in Lloyd. So, yeah, it was just really neat. to see. You know, from really humble beginnings. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And, you know, we have big dreams and we had really big dreams for the first year. And you want to talk about humble. Well, tell me about it. Your first year you started in Streamstown. Yeah. So we're still in Streamstown. We.

That place hadn't seen that much action in probably 70 years. Exactly. Yeah. It's a 1934 hall. Through COVID, you know, through COVID, we had a few meetings in that place. all of a sudden, you know, 100 people, well, how big was that one meeting? 150 probably, 150 people descended on the little town of Streamstown. There's cars everywhere.

Cars everywhere. And, man, I apologize. I'm forgetting his name. But a man whose family had escaped Russia was talking about, was telling me about that in the middle of COVID. And I was like, oh, man, we can't be getting that bad, can we? And then, of course, then they locked the border down and on and on and on and on and on. on it went and uh yeah streams town was it was an interesting one of those random halls we'd show up to every once in a while for a meeting anyways you guys tuned it into a school yeah so i had been there

for some of those meetings um and i i don't know if i'd ever been there before i'd driven by streams town but i'd never been to the hall and so i was looking for a place to have the school And I was like, where can we go? That's like quiet. Nice green space. You know, if they bring masks back in, like maybe we can, you know, fly under the radar a little bit. We won't have... In the middle of nowhere, Streamstown.

Right. Oh, man. Well, I just laugh about it. Think about how much we were all stressed. I know. And Streamstown is about it's off the beaten path as you're going to get. Who the heck is going to raise the stink there? There would probably be one or two.

There is. Right? I mean, I always tell this story at Christmas, 2020, I want to say. I want to say it was Christmas 2020. We wrote up mom and dads and mom and dad live on the hill and they plowed out their backyard so we could all park there so nobody would see that we're there. That's the insanity. That's in the middle of nowhere. I mean, honestly, uh, never go back there. We're never going back there. We aren't going back there. And I see it. I see it all the time, you know, and what you're doing and what we're doing. I look around at all these different groups and

all these. I know they call lots of them call themselves freedom fighters. I don't know. know if I'd love maybe that term, but anyways, there's a lot of people like standing up and we're never going back. We just, we can't, we can't allow it. But I agree with the Christmas 2020, we hosted it at our place because I knew our neighbors were like-minded. And so everybody left their cell phones at home. Like, think about that. Yeah, it's crazy. And even, I think it was, was it Easter 2020? Like shortly after everything closed down, we did the same thing. We hosted. And all of my family came out and everybody left their cell phones at home. Yeah.

Anyways. You know, it's probably a good. We should probably be all leaving our cell phones an awful lot more these days. But I mean, it's wild to hear everybody's recollections of that time because, you know, and we're not out. I mean, there's still stuff going on today. But certainly 2020 is going to stand out for a long time as one of the oddest years where it was just complete insanity. 2021 wasn't much better, but actually it's probably worse. But yeah, so you start Christian Shine Academy.

How many families did you start with? Eight. And so you started with eight kids or how many kids? No, we had 14 kids, eight families. Eight families. And in our mind, we were going to have 30 students our first year. And... So was it disappointing to have 14?

It was, but I laugh at it. Now, so we had, you know, this number of 30 and we're like, that's not very many, like, but it's a good number to start. Now, you have to remember, like, we're not teachers. We did have a certified teacher come on staff at that time. But it's a curriculum that none of us really were familiar with. We chose ACE curriculum because it's nicely laid out. And what is ACE? So it's accelerated Christian education.

Okay. Yeah. And it's been around 50 years, known worldwide. So we liked how it was laid out and it was simple and there wasn't a whole bunch of planning and investigating for ourselves, right? And yeah, so anyways, 30 students. Oh, now we're getting close to startup time and we only have 14. And you have to remember that our board is five families of the eight. And anyways, we had people believe in what we were talking about and what we were trying to do.

And, you know, those other few families hopped on board. And we're like, okay, well, we're just going to push through. We don't know about, you know, the financial aspect, really. Like, how do you afford to pay, you know, staff and rent and all these things? And we look back now, though, and we don't have 30 students still. We have 26 this year. And there's no way we could have. You had to start small.

And I say all the time, thank God he knew what he was doing because we sure didn't. We didn't have a clue what we were getting into. So the 14 students were amazing, like watching them all come together. Some were homeschool families, some were public school. And watching those kids all come together and develop relationships and our and our staff develop, you know, that sense of community that we were all really missing and looking for. Just amazing. It was so amazing.

And at one point, I remember us sitting there and we're like, this is just so good. Do we want to expand? Do we want to do that? Like, everything is just running so smooth. And of course, we know that that's not the plan. So this year, We had 12 families. And again, it's just cool watching these kids all interact.

And what's the age range for the kids? Well, so this year. Or maybe great. Maybe I should use grades. Yeah. So we offer now this year, grade one. We didn't offer that the first year because we run like a one room schoolhouse in that hall, right?

And grade one is so interactive and so lively and wild. And we just didn't feel it. would fit last year. So this year we offered grade one. And so we have grade one to grade 10. And we actually had an ATCO trailer donated by L&L Oilfield. T-Barr 1 delivered it for us. Shout out to L&L and shout out to the boys over at T-bar. Nice little how you doing there. Yeah, absolutely. It's awesome to see community rally behind what we're doing. And so yeah, both the delivery on the trailer were donated so that we could have grade one. And we were talking about that last year and we're like, how do we do grade one?

Like, what? Like, we really want to offer that. We have so many people coming and asking about it. And I was camping with my family and my dad said, why don't you look at doing like some sort of an at-co trailer shack or something and moving it out there? I was like, that's not a bad idea. And so, yeah, I mentioned it to Jake.

and a few of the other families and Jake Moorebutter is the one that tracked it down and had it moved out there for us and we're like, okay, so if we're getting this trailer, like, how many students do we have to have to make it, you know, feasible? We needed five. And how many students came? Five. And so it's just, it's really neat to see how every time we have a need, it's being fulfilled. And I'd love to of one, watching how God's working, and two, watching how the community pulls together to help us grow. And I'm sure that's going to be the same case when we open Lloyd. So do you, okay, so you have an Agco trailer out at Streamstown Hall right now?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 26 students going full-time. Yes. And that's five days a week? No, we do four days a week. Four days a week? So we do Monday to Thursday, 830 to 3.30. And our school, year is September till the end of May. Yeah, it's pretty sweet. I assume you're okay to talk costs on air. What does it cost a family to bring a kid there? Right. Okay, so just to clarify, Lloyd could be different, just depending. Sure, we're running off Streamstown. Yeah, everything I talk about is Streamstown. Yeah, you betcha. So right now for one student, it's $275 a month. If you have two students attending, it's $425 a month. And for three students in a family, it's $500 a month. If you have

forward. I'm sorry, folks. Doesn't that sound extremely reasonable? I suppose you have to drive them there, right? You do have to drive them. You got to get them out there and you've got to pick them up. So you're not having a busing system. But I mean, don't get me wrong. They're going to say, well, public school, you don't pay for anything. Right. Right. But I'd like to think that we offer more than public school does. You know, there's a lot more one-on-one. Even though the kids are doing an individualized program and it's like self-led, there's that one-on-one opportunity. Do you ever have, and I don't, I'm getting off the track now, do you have kind of like an open house day? Yes.

Where families or kids can go experience it. Yeah, we did do an open house last year and we'll do another one this year. It's really hard to like wrap your head around what we do without seeing the classroom. And that was like a real struggle for us even. When we're sitting setting up the learning center according to ACE protocols. So there's certain procedures and protocols that we have to follow. And so we're like, what do you mean like an office? And the kids aren't in desks sitting in rows, you know, like.

So our desks are all, they fold up into just a square. It's the neatest thing so that you can store them away if needed. But we have them all on the perimeter of the room. And that way the teacher can see every student and what they're doing. Sure. It just keeps them more focused, right? And I actually really struggled with the thought of that because of COVID. I was like, our kids have already been segregated.

like I don't want them sitting in some little box, you know? And then once we actually saw it, we're like, oh, wait, this really makes sense. I see why they do what they do. It just really helps them to stay focused. Don't get me wrong. They're still turning in their chairs or still rolling around being kids. And, you know, it's not like they are in a cubicle and they can't see anything around them.

It's just the sides. And yeah, so anyways, that's kind of neat. So we do, yeah, we do like to have an open house. We always interview families before they join. We have to make sure everybody's on the same page, make sure that the curriculum is going to work for that student. We want parents to see how things are set up and how things are run because it's not the same as public school at all. Like our kids score their own work. So we have a giant table.

in the middle with files and they go and pull their score keys and correct their own work. And so the reason it's in the middle of the room so that the teachers can see, they're not taking up a pencil and changing their answers, which does happen. So they're only supposed to have a red pen up there to correct their answers. But yeah, it's pretty neat. How many teachers do you have? Right now we have. So Don Stridehorst is our full-time main.

lead teacher. Sandra Lossich is full-time and she's the assistant. And then my oldest daughter, Hannah, actually just graduated high school last year. And we needed somebody to come do reading and word building with some of the kids and just fill in that gap. So she's there part-time and she's there every morning for a few hours. And then Bonnie Sugar's in on Mondays. And she comes and helps with phys ed and does novel studies and that kind of thing. So we have a fairly big group. And then the grade ones, Annie Forre is out in the trailer with the grade ones. So we have a big stuff compared to what we had last year. Almost as many teachers as you had in your first year's students. Yeah, you don't, what we didn't understand, I guess, is the amount of work that still goes into

a program like this. Like most people, and us included, I guess, we're thinking, you know, you have all these students doing their own work, correcting their own work. Why do you need so much staff? Well, almost because of that, and because every student is on an individualized program, working at their own pace, doing their own thing, it's actually more taxing, right? So Don's could be helping, you know, a grade three student with English and then all of a sudden, oh, you know, you got a grade seven student with some social studies questions. And there's always just a need for extra help and you're not just standing there teaching one thing to everybody. Yeah, you're guiding the, yeah, individually. Yeah.

So it's pretty interesting to watch the flexibility that she needs to have. What's, when you, you know, when you look, this is year three? This is year two. Year two. What were some of the, like when you first started, and maybe even now that you're like, I don't mean to point out the shortcomings of it, but, you know, at the same point,

you're sitting there and you're hearing about this for the first time, you're driving around somewhere, you're like, there's a what now? And why have I never heard of this before? Maybe you have. Maybe you're sitting there. You go, yeah, but what about X? What is one of the shortcomings that you're like,

we've been trying to address? you know when we first started up we hadn't thought about gym class we hadn't thought about having you know a one room you know like i hear all the stories of ones room schoolhouse but grade one to 10 that is quite the diverse group of students um what are some of the things that you're like oh i hadn't thought about that so for sure gym class is a challenge um this winter we've been very fortunate um yeah there's lots of activities outside you can't have gym inside there's desks everywhere tables set up. So if it's minus 40 or 50 like it was, there was a lot of games and cards and that kind of thing in place of gym and recess. So that is a struggle for where we're at. And that

is why I thought it was so important though to have a place with a green space. So like last year we had a big snow hill built. Ellen L&L and Mike's oil field built us an arena. This winter, we just haven't had the weather to get it up and running again. It's been melting. I know. Like what is going on? Well, and we found out last year that you can't build a rink when it's minus 40 either. Like it doesn't work.

The ice was all, yeah, I was just cracked and broken and not. Yeah, it was a nightmare. I felt bad for Jake. He put a lot of work into getting that rink up and running for us last year. So this year is a little bit of a different struggle. Like, yes, the weather is nice, but the kids are like getting bored. They're like, well, we don't, we can't skate. We don't have a snow hill.

Like, what do we do? So we've been brainstorming some different ideas. And Bonnie's really good at coming up with activities for the kids. But definitely gym is, gym and recess is where we struggle the most. And then we have kids that fly through their goals in a day. So every kid sets their own goals, how many pages they have to do in a day. And we have some kids just kind of fly through it before. noon and then it's like usually our afternoons entail like more activity time or like might do

hmm what kinds of things have we done we've done like canning or we've done candle making we've had different speakers come in we try to bring life skills so our afternoons are more interactive than just sitting there doing work so that's a struggle if you have kids that are done their work before noon it's like well we really need you to be quiet and like there's not really a separate space to send them to, you know, to go work on anything. So we were trying to come up with quiet activities. They've been doing puzzles. We had them making all their own, like, Christmas decorations to decorate the hall and the tree, that kind of thing. So we get creative. And it's fine. But it would be nice to have another space, I think. You know, and the thing for me,

Sorry, something in my throat, folks. The thing for me is no school sports, obviously. There's no Shine Academy going and whipping up on one of the rural schools. Is that been a struggle or, you know, like with, you know, I just, I'll pick on Lloyd or Lloyd or Kid's Guy or whatever. You know, in the wintertime, especially in Canada, folks, like everybody, not everybody, a healthy majority of people play hockey. So you don't need to be a part of a school to be, and I assume that's a chunk of the kids. kids. Is that a big concern or has that been in an adjustment? I think everybody, nobody's really mentioned it. It has been talked about with the board and it's

something that we would like to collaborate the Lloyd and the Streamstown eventually and put together some sports teams. Currently it seems fine. Like you said, lots of our kids play hockey. We have lots in fight farm. We've got kids in dance. So they all have extracurriculars anyways. Yeah. Eventually we would like to be able to offer, you know, have a basketball team or a volleyball team. Another thing that we are looking towards is like carpentry or welding. We would love to be able to send some of our kids to local businesses and learn, you know, hands-on skills.

We really want to teach life skills. We try really hard to bring in people to do that. Like I said with the candle making or the canning, that kind of stuff. Our kids really want chickens. They want chickens. Can we get the people to the kids some chickens, folks? That can't be that hard of an ass, can it? It's not.

It's the upkeep of the chickens, right? It's kind of like a kid with a puppy. They want the puppy and then don't want to take care of it anymore. That's fair. Yeah, I think we are going to lean that way. The reason being, with our finances being so minimal, we need to figure out how to generate income for ourselves. And we thought, what if the kids sell eggs? Like, why not, right?

What about starting a little greenhouse and having them sell tomato plants in the spring? and things like that. You know, we can't always... Dale Wilker's listening. You know, I had Dale Wilker on from Invermere, and he was the architect who helped build the greenhouse that attached to the school so that, you know, kids could get their hands in the dirt and on and on and went, right?

And I don't know what they do with the produce. I don't think they sell it. But when you're talking life skills, and just life in general, right, seeing things grow and how they... on and on it goes. That comes to mind, like, right away. I really, yeah, I enjoyed your interview with him, and it really got my wheels turning.

And then I also follow the Prairie Principal on, from Altario. He came through, that's a guy I've never had on. It was suggested to me, and then I don't know where I was. I didn't get to see him. He's good, is he? Well, I just follow him on Facebook, and the things that that school does is, that's my dream. I would love to see something like that around here. And where's he at him?

Altario. Where's Altario? Mm-hmm. Where's Alterio? Like south of here? That's a new one, folks. I know everybody was listening to Ontario. Oh, yeah, Ontario.

Altario. Altario. Alberta? Saskatchew. No, it's Alberta because he was principal at consort as well. So I think they're not too far apart. I've never been there. Yeah.

Whoever knows where Altaria, you know, I'll be getting somebody. shoot me a message or 10 people. Either way, I'm excited because I'm like, Altario, alterio. Okay, sorry. That's all right. No, so yeah, we definitely, we've talked about lots of different ideas like that to help generate some income, as well as teach some life skills, teach them some entrepreneurship, which they've kind of learned on their own. I never, I haven't talked about this yet, but our students earn merit money. So when you have good goal check, all your homework's done, you know, here's 50, $50 merit dollars. Our students are in charge of cleaning. So some sweep floor, some cleans bathrooms,

the kitchen, whatever, right? You earn merit money that way. So they built forts outside in the trees, and then they were selling them back and forth for merit money. And we had my daughter, we got her a wobble stool and it was the wrong size. And so I phoned Amazon, whatever, got the right one coming. And she turned around and sold her first stool to another student for some more merit money. Like there's always these like side deals that the kids are doing and it's just hilarious. I always say like, I don't want to kibosh it because that's entrepreneurship. They're thinking outside the box, you know? That's not really how they're supposed to earn it, but they're being creative.

Wheeling and dealing. Yeah. Well, we used to wheel and deal hockey cards and different things back in the day. I just saw my oldest wheeling and dealing Pokemon cards. And once upon a time, it was pogs. There's always something kids always are trying to, you know, oh, I'll give you, you know, what was it back in the day? I'll give you three Oilers if you give me Stevie Y, right?

Oh, oilers, and you'd get Stevie Y and you'd be like, yeah, and then your parents would be like, go give it back. You know exactly what you're doing. Oh, but he traded it for it. Like, I mean, right? Like, maybe I'm, am I the only one? I don't know, folks. The hockey cards was great.

Lloyd Minster. Yes. Okay. This is probably the big news. You know, like, maybe I should have had you in two years ago. I don't know. The Shine Academy going out at Streamstown, you're kind of like, what is this thing? All right.

Let's see. Does it last a year? Does it last multiple years? And not only is it lasted a couple of years, but now it's got a second location coming in Lloyd Minster. Walk me through this. And, yeah, walk me through this. Okay.

So just to clarify, we are a homeschool co-op. We are not a school. In the government's eyes, we are not a school. Yeah, in the government's eyes, I'm not media. So welcome to the show, folks, you know? We want to stay as a homeschool co-op. It allows us more flexibility and to fly kind of under the radar. But in saying that, we only get homeschool funding per student.

So that presents the challenges. And when I talk about finances, it's like we get $900 per student per year. Yeah. Like that's nothing, right? That buys curriculum. So that's why we have tuition. That's why we fundraise. That's why we ask for donations.

But yeah. So how can people donate? They can reach out to Shine Christian Academy 22 at gmail.com or our Facebook. page. What I'll do, folks, is I'm going to put both of that in the show notes. Deanna's going to remind me to put that both in the show notes, but we're going to put that both in the show notes. That way, if you're listening to that, you're like, oh, I should just scroll down. You can email or you can hop onto the Facebook page. Sorry. Perfect. Yeah. So I knew probably partway through our first year that there was a need.

There was a real big need for a second homeschool co-op in Lloyd. The amount of texts, emails, phone calls that myself and the board get, like, it's just so numerous, I can't keep track. So as we've progressed, we do have a few Lloyd families driving out now, and they said, like, yeah, what do we have to do to make this happen? So we're kind of starting from scratch almost again in the fact that we don't really know where the building is going to be. We don't know how many students there are, you know, interested in coming. So we had a very, what's the word? We had a very general community meeting just a couple of weeks ago at the Arch Church. Just to kind of talk about who we are, what we do.

March 4th will be our next meeting and Rob from Arise Christian Academy out of Calgary so he is our overseeing board he will be in attendance and he'll come kind of speak a little bit more to just the the processes I guess

the fact that we are accountable to somebody still who are not just some parents that are wheeling and dealing yeah just making things up as we go sometimes don't get me wrong we do but we I would say teachers would probably say it sometimes they they make up things on the roll on the go as well right you're dealing with children so at times you got to kind of fly by the seat of your pants yeah absolutely there's definitely some of that that happens during the day

but yeah so March 4th we will be having a meeting at city church Rob will be down the board will speak again a little bit to how you know we run a classroom we're hoping to have a building kind of pinned down by that point. We do have our eye on one, but we just want to take a look at a couple other options and make sure that it is the right fit. Yeah, I think if people want information coming to that March 4th meeting is super important. And we'll have an open house, again, at Streamstown. I know people don't seem to like to drive to the country, but We'll announce that too, I would guess probably in May sometime we'll open the doors again and have a community meeting and let everybody kind of come see how the offices are set up, how the learning center is ran, meet our current staff. Because we're going to support the Lloyd School, right?

Like we're not just going to set something up and kind of step back. It's going to still be our board. We have the experience. we've jumped through the hoops and, you know, tripped over the hurdles and that kind of thing. So, yeah, we plan to have a few, I don't know how we're going to run it exactly, but two or three local parents join us, whether it be like right on the board, if we expand our board or if we do like a parent council. But we want to have some local families involved and just building it. It's so, so important that parents be involved in their kids' education and hold us accountable.

And everything is transparent. You know, we don't have anything to hide from anybody. And that's easy to do at Streamstown when you, you know, have 12 families. But with the amount of people that seem to be interested in Lloyd, like we just really, it would be nice to have a few local people that can kind of be that go between parents and board members and then of course like we'll have general meetings where the parents are sure involved but yeah we try to keep everything as transparent as can be and I know that word is overly used these days but we actually have nothing to hide you know

you said um you said at the start you know the first year you're like well we need 30 kids and then you got 14 you're like oh you know right When you stare at Lloyd, have you been like, do you even want to put out? Are you saying like there's spots for 200? There's spots for 10. Right. I would say our goal probably is 20 to 30 students. But again, that depends on the building.

But the building depends on how many people are, you know, kind of committed. And I would say 20 to 30 is a good number to start with. And again, you know, coming to those meetings and then sitting down with families and doing the interviews that we do, it's really important. And it kind of helps parents understand what they're getting into because you're not just dropping your kids off at the school door and picking them up anymore. Like every one of our families is super involved in fundraising. They volunteer in the classroom. We just, it's really, really important for parents to be involved in their kids' education. and we're here to facilitate and help,

but ultimately it still requires parent involvement. You know, I pointed out, hey, what were all the pitfalls? But I forgot to ask, you know, when you started this, there had to have been things that worked way beyond your wildest dreams of like, wow, this is like really cool and didn't see this coming or maybe, you know, I thought there was a kind of work, but like I can't believe that kids can, you know, in my mind, mark their own tests and like Excel or. work at you know I'm just throwing out some ideas in your mind you know when you're when

you get a parent yeah I'm a parent I'm sitting here and I'm gone I don't know I don't know or maybe you're driving somewhere folks and you're like yeah me I don't know you know the public system's okay for me what's what's what's some of the things you go yeah but like this was pretty cool and I never saw this coming or something along that line so I would say the kids growth. We teach personal responsibility, and that's built right into the ACE curriculum. And watching those kids struggle, and every one of them did, whether they were homeschool or public schooled, struggled because it's different. But watching them build their confidence

and achieving an 80% or higher, so you have to have an 80% to pass. And I honestly was really worried about my daughter. She missed grade one because of COVID basically. Part of grade two. And I was like, how is she, you know, going to do here? Like she can hardly read and rate. So watching her struggle and overcome those struggles and have that one-on-one time with our staff and just really watching her dig deep and push.

And I see that in so many of the kids, watching them dig deep and push. push, whether it be cursive writing or just like having to reread instructions, right, and kind to teach themselves and work through some of those problems, whatever, that's been the coolest thing for me. Watching them, persevere, watching them think that they can't achieve an 80 because maybe they weren't, you know, good in math before. But now, you know, they're doing 80 minimum. Like, it's really cool. Like my daughter just got a report card the other day and she got, 92 and a half average now. And this is a kid that like literally could hardly read and write and would just sit and cry.

And so to watch her grow like that. What grade is she in? Well, there's not really grades. So it's more like levels. Sure. Yeah. And so. Roughly what level is she at?

Four or five. Okay. Grade four or five now. And what's interesting to me is I don't know if you're in the public sector. You go, I haven't heard 80%. Wow. When was the last time anyone heard of grade marks? Right.

Instead of, yeah, E for excellent. E for excellent, right? And you're like, what is it? You look at your kid's report card. It's like needs work, whatever. It's like, hmm. You know, it's so different to that when I was a kid because we used to, I can't remember what grade it started.

I don't know if it was as early as what you folks are doing. I can't remember that. But it certainly, you know, by grade. five and six, you were doing cursive writing and getting graded on things on and on it went, right? Yeah, I remember bringing my report card home. That was a big day. That was a really big day, you know? Like, oh, boy, here we go.

I got a 70 and something, you know. Oh, good for you. I used to be, I tell you what, up until high school, I was what, a high 80 average? Nice. And then I went to high school and dropped to like a 72 average. It was a rough, a little stint there. And then I got to college, met my wife. And within like a month of meeting her, I'd give, she bugs me more all the time.

She whipped me in shape. I went from being a probably C student to I was P-Oed at the end because I missed an A-plus average by like, by like a hair. And it's pretty crazy when you, when you get the right motivation, for me, like, stumbling into the right subject and all of a sudden being lit up by it and like getting, you know, I was a history major and like wanting to be in class. was a crazy feeling, right? It wasn't just, I'm going to whatever, roll through it now. And, yeah, I, the, the, what's the word I'm looking for?

The separation from being a C-minus student where you don't care to an A-plus student or close to that, isn't that big of a degree. It's just shifting a couple things and all of a sudden, off you go. I think a lot of kids can be like that. So, that's cool. You know, when we got our youngest, he's four. and you've got, you know, everybody knows, I love hockey, so want him to play hockey. At four, he just doesn't care.

So we put him in intro to hockey and we put him in Can Skate. In Can Skate, day one, he laid on the ice for 45 minutes and it like tore at my soul. I'm like, I got to go get him. And the moms are like, if you go get him now, he will know, he has you. And you're going to get him every day. And I'm like, all right, so what do I do? Because this is painful. I'm literally watching this go on and he's just like, you know, he's not getting off the ice.

Anyways, a couple days ago, he skated for 45 minutes. Perfect. And what is that teaching a kid, right? When you talk about the growth of seeing their confidence, like, to me, that's what comes to mind. Like, that's what you want kids to learn. Yep, absolutely. Yeah, I don't mind watching them struggle. And I don't mean that to sound harsh or anything, but it's what comes out on the other side.

know, it's, it's tough to watch the tears sometimes or to watch the anger come out. It happens at my house. But so to watch, you know, so every morning the kids get cheered for. So if you wrote a test day before you get a congratulations slip. And so to watch them struggle through whatever subject that was and then come out with their 80 and get their congratulations slip and have the rest of the class cheering for them and high-fiving them, that's cool. I love watching that.

And that is my all-time favorite part about what we do right now. You know, watching them play at recess and, like, build those relationships, very cool. But watching them, you know, just really push themselves and then stand there so proud and accomplished, that's the best part of what we do. Well, before I let you out of here, is there anything else we haven't covered? You know, I want to remind people that in the show notes, we'll have the email address if you want to reach out, Facebook page, if they want to follow up with anything, donate, that type of thing.

That'll be the two best ways to reach out and find out how they can help. It's kind of what I assume. Is there anything else that you want to, you know, March 4th, you mentioned, city church, did you give a time? No, I didn't. 7 p.m. 7 p.m. is going to be the open, or not the open house, the informational, on the Lloydminster, can I call it a campus?

Can I call it campus? Campus, it sounds, yeah. Is there anything else that you want to let people know about? Because, I mean, I got all the time. If you got other things, you want to tell about it, now's the time. I would just like to mention, too, we're going to be looking for staff. And I know that there are parents out there that maybe homeschooling is not working for them. put this in your mind.

We don't have to have certified teachers because we are a homeschool co-op. It is nice because they definitely bring some different ideas and obviously experience. Can I come talk to the Kids at Boat podcast? I would love that. They would love that. Absolutely. Going on the road. Professor Newman.

If we can call it a campus, Sean can give himself a fancy little title. Oh yeah. And I know that we have a couple students that would be super happy to, you know, interview with you and chat your ear off. Well, you know, my wife teaches in Lashburn. And once upon a time I got to interview Murray McDonnell. And he was, there's a rugby field out in Lashburn named after him. And I got to interview him in front of like the entire school. So they had different classes come in and watch what I was doing.

I was in like my first like 50. You want to talk about nerves. Not knowing what the heck I was doing. and then do it in front of a bunch of young kids who were just like right in your girl. I was like, this is intense. And then a college park came and I got to go in there too. So I would love to, I would love the opportunity to come and share a little bit of,

if that fits, you know, skills and everything else. No, we're always looking for people to come in the classroom. So that's another thing. We have a fellow coming to talk about taxidermy. We are looking for somebody to come forward. and talk about like hunting and trapping, fishing skills. Like, we really want to teach the kids all kinds of stuff. We were fortunate last year in November.

We were chosen as one of the homeschool groups to go to farm fair in Edmonton. And we have, you know, egg background in a lot of our families. So the kids were just super pumped. Like, they just couldn't wait to go see all the cattle and check everything out. So we're always looking for people to kind of. come in and speak to what they do. So absolutely, you're totally welcome to come in. Look out shine. I'm coming. I think it'd be a ton of fun. Honestly, I'm like, I've never been in, like I've been in the Streamstone Hall. I've heard a lot about what you find folks are doing,

but I've never, I've never graced the, you know, the school and seeing what's, what's actually happening. And to come meet everybody and kind of just see it for my own self, I think would be very beneficial, right? So like, I think it'd be a learning experience on both ends. But yeah, I mean, off air we can talk about the logistics of that time frame and all that good stuff but yeah i'd love to come do that and i'm sure there's you know a bunch of people listening right now that have skills that would be you know when you're talking about life skills and you know um hunting fishing gardening etc etc i'm like oh boy there's probably a few people that could reach out that way too that would be a benefit you know to come and give an afternoon or whatever the time frame is to to come um you know

because like that's the cool thing about what you what you have going on is there's like the ability to come in and share people's stories, share life skills about different parts of, you know, the world and useful skills that kids can learn. Yeah, we would love to welcome anybody that, you know, if you do something unique, especially, I was following a guy on Facebook and then I found out he's from Edmonton, but he makes swords. And I'm like, how cool would that be? He has a mobile unit.

let's teach the kid to make swords. Like, how cool? Why not? You think swords? You think just at the farmer's market, you could have honey or there's a silver guy from, I can't remember. I can't remember. I sat in chalk with him.

It's a Pierce land somewhere over there. Anyways, he was interesting, monetary system. Well, I'm just, I'm spittballing ideas now. Now you got my brain rolling. I'm like, there's a lot of people you could bring into that. Yep. Well, right out a list for me. We do have a list going.

And we are looking for all kinds of people. So, yeah, if you're feeling like you, you know, want to drive out to Streamstown and come talk to the students about something, just shoot us an email. Do you get pushback for being Christian? Oh, there's always going to be attacks for being Christian for sure. Yeah. That's okay.

People wish you would just leave that at home? I haven't heard that, but it's just like, oh, that's not for us. Right? And if you don't like what we do, that's fine. have to pay tuition and come. It's just that easy. Yeah, you kind of, um, who am I thinking of right now? There was it, man, was it on Instagram, Twitter? What was it? There's a guy just talking about, you know, once you set up who you are, like, that's who I am. Yep. Man, if you don't like it, that's fine. Mm-hmm. And that's basically what your school is doing, right? Your co-op is like,

this who we are. If you don't like it, that's fine. Yeah. You don't have to go. No, And there's no hard feelings. It doesn't work for everyone. For somebody feeling that process out, how much of that is in the day today? Every aspect. Morning prayer? I don't know. What else?

When you say every aspect, what do you mean? Every aspect. So the kids come in in the morning and they start off with prayer, O Canada. Dawn actually like tailors the prayer every morning. The kids put in requests. Sometimes they're hilarious because it's about an animal or whatever. But anyways, they all have a prayer request. Then they go and do devotion.

They sit up on the Streens Town Hall stage there and everybody gets comfy with their Bibles and she does a devotion and they read some scripture. And then every pace is biblical. Every single part of every pace book that they work through, whether it be math, English, whatever, is biblical. There's always a scripture that they have to memorize. So what do you mean math? Let's pick on math for a second.

Old school math like we learned. Okay. But is that biblical? No, but there's scripture. They'll put scripture in the writing of it at the bottom of every. So Samuel was walking down the street and heading towards, I don't know. Am I right or am I wrong? I haven't read the word problems.

So I'm not sure. The reason I bring that up is because, you know, part of, part of like, Soji and all that on the flip side that people get upset about. Right. Is that they take a word problem and they interject, it's a way of getting like DEI and different things into the school system. Right. Under people's noses, right?

It's a math problem. But let's talk about all the kids and what, right? And we've whole, I don't know, have we all heard this story? The end of the day is, it allows it to kind of seep into a math problem. That's a word problem. And instead of it just being a bullet train going down and not worrying about who can get on said bullet train and who can afford it and on and on,

they start to interject those thoughts. And then the kids have to worry about social issues instead of just a math problem. And that's all I'm asking. When it comes to, because at the end of the day, you're shying Christian academy. You're pretty blatant in what you are. Just as an outsider looking in,

I'm like, oh, maybe they stole that from, you know, 50 years of it being around. Maybe that's where they're getting, because is there any new idea under the sun? I don't think so. So I was just, when I heard that, I'm like, oh. Yeah. They're like, well, if we can talk about Samuel walking down the street, maybe we can talk about, you know, he, him. Right.

They her, they, them. Well, whatever. Well, there's none of that at our school, that's for sure. But, yeah, every aspect of every pace book has some sort of biblical teaching in it. Yeah, it doesn't matter what it is. And all of the novels, too, have a Christian basis. to them. We just, we wouldn't even bring in a book that doesn't.

Well, appreciate you coming in and doing this. What we're going to do, though, because I want people on Substack to hear a bit about this, is that we're going to take a brief pause. If you're listening to the podcast, come over to Substack with us, because I want to make sure that people who don't tune in every episode and they're just catching the exclusives that they understand when Shines coming to Lloyd and all that good stuff. So we're going to take a brief pause.

and then we're going to have a short little substack. So if you want to follow us over there, please do. Okay, welcome to Substack, sitting with Deanna Franklin. Thanks for sticking around to the entire Substack audience. If you haven't listened to the full episode, I suggest you go back and in the Substack post, there's a link for it. So click on that and go listen to the full thing.

On this side, Substack, brought to you by Crude Master Transport. Shout out to Heath and Tracy McDonald. what I was going to I guess for the audience you know you're bringing shine Christian Academy to Lloyd Minster I think that's a big deal I think that's something that people if they hadn't never thought of maybe they need to or maybe they don't maybe they just slide this across but when we look at the coming year of 2024 you've got a March meeting coming up March 4th 7 p.m. City Church what is the plan for the rest of 24 when you you you're you're going to you You know, like one of the things we, one of the things seems to be the question I ask on this side, a substack is like, what are you positive on? What are you preparing for in the year to come? You're planning to expand. So what does that look like and what should the city of Lloyd possibly expect?

I realize we're hypothetical here because you haven't had your meeting. You don't know how many families and everything else. But if you're sitting in the city of Lloyd, when do you look at as like maybe opening day, et cetera? Obviously enrollment is a huge part of. this I get that but to the substack person who just tuned in maybe just a what is 2024 the later part of or the start of the new school year oh man we haven't even got out of the first one but what does that look like so we're hoping to have a building pin down kind of maybe by the March 4th meeting

if not shortly after we will be opening registrations for the Lloyd school, well, as well as Streamstown, but for Lloyd, I would say, the end of March, and then they'll close the end of June, and that just allows us some time to figure out staffing needs. And, yeah, Shine and Lloyd will be up and running for, I think it's September 3rd is the schedule day. It's the Tuesday after the long week.

So how many people are you going to need, like, assuming, let's just say it goes the same way the first one. Mm-hmm. Okay, 14 students come rolling in. That's what you got in Lloyd. It starts off nice and small. Yep. You got a building picked out.

How many staff do you need? It would be nice to have three. Yeah, we struggled through last year with two, and then Sandra was in volunteering all her time, and yeah, thankfully she was available to do that. So three. Okay, so to the audience member, they're looking for three staff.

for Lloydminster. You run off of a little bit of tuition from the government. 900 bucks a student, correct? Yeah, so the $900 is the homeschool funding that the government provides per student. And so, yeah, we get that money and then whatever tuition we charge outside of that. So we work on a very tight budget. And I guess the most important thing for people to understand is that we operate more as a ministry than as as anything else.

Everything that we do is to glorify God in his kingdom. And if you come work at shine, you will be blessed upon measure, but not necessarily financially. Well, as we sit here, you know, like one of the things the audience does as they feel. You know, I've never been like, you've got to do this. But, you know, like I look at it and I go, one of the things I, I don't know from our chat. I'm like, okay, so you're operating in this shoe string budget.

You got people volunteering. You got, you know, you started out with 14 students now 26, correct? And you've got a second location opening up. So it's like, oh, there's just, you know, if people feel interested in help, want to find out more, feel pulled to help, that type of thing. There's different ways. There's, you know, as we talked about in the interview, if you got a skill that you think is beneficial for kids, You could reach out if you got, if you're wealthy beyond belief, you know, feel free to donate.

Feel free to donate to the Sean Newman podcast too if you're wealthy beyond belief. But I mean, that's a way to help. There's a lot of different ways to piece this together is all I'm pointing at. And when you have thousands of people tuning in and everything else, you might be amazed at what comes in and pulls at different people. There's a lot of interesting people out there that want to help unique ideas and find different ways. So I guess with you coming to Lloyd, that's all I wanted to shine a light on on substack. And is there anything else? Because I always do this where I get talking. And if there's anything that you want to make sure that gets said to the audience, please do. If you don't

want to donate monetarily, and maybe you just can't, we accept school supplies. We cover all of the school supplies for our students because we felt, you know, they're already paying tuition. We didn't want to ask families to also send, you know, crayons and pencils and that kind of thing. So every year so far we've had school supplies donated and like bags and bags. Like it's crazy. We have enough crayons for a couple of years. It's great. What are you short on?

Pencils. Oh my goodness. I don't know what they do with them, but pencils and eraser and red pens. Those are the things that we just burn through daily. And another thing would be the fact that we, are going to need to build some offices for the students. And so any kind of hardware, lumber supplies, that kind of stuff, if anybody has, even the skills to help build them, that'd take the pressure off our husbands that we just

delegate all these jobs to. Yeah, extra hands. That way would be really great. And yeah, any of those supplies to help build the offices would be good. I can get measurements and materials and that kind of thing organized. Well, I appreciate you coming in and doing this. Deanna folks, Shine Christian Academy coming to Lloyd September and meeting March 4th. So if you're interested, that would be the big day in this substack post as long as Sean's operating at full capacity.

We should have all that information there for you. Some days, I'm sure people on both sides of this thing wonder about me. But hopefully we'll have that all up and up to date. for you but look forward to seeing what comes and you know as per a conversation here earlier look forward to coming out and seeing the academy out in streams town and interacting with students and and just seeing what it's all about because one of the things about talking is I'm like I really don't know enough about it I just I just don't I understand the idea but overall I don't I don't actually if you've never seen it's like I don't know right it's hard to wrap

your brain around for sure and you can check out our Facebook page and there's all sorts of pictures and posts of daily activities from the kids. We, I find lately we've been too busy to keep up daily, but you'll get the gist of what goes on there. So. Oh, cool. Well, thank you very much for coming in and doing this.