By Melanie Rossi
Contributing Writer
GREEN BAY – Grace Christian Academy (GCA), a non-denominational Christian school for students from grades 4K through 12, will move from Pulaski to Green Bay before the 2023-24 school year.
The school was founded 10 years ago in Pulaski with the goal of providing students a Christian-based education and a focus on community outreach.
Amber Rockey, GCA’s school board secretary, emphasized that the school has an incredibly strong commitment to community service — a core value that drives the school’s mission of “leaving a legacy of walking with Christ.”
She said, “Specifically, our mission is to disciple students towards leaving a legacy of walking with Christ. How that plays out would be that everything we do is discipleship driven, so we’re teaching our students how to stand as strong Christians in a world that is growing… increasingly less Christian.”
The upcoming 2023-24 school year will be the school’s first in Green Bay; for the past nine years in Pulaski, they’ve formed relationships with the community that have allowed them to fulfill their mission of being “Christ-Centered, Bible-Based and Discipleship-Driven.”
“For the past nine years we’ve been in Pulaski,” Rockey said. “And we’ve held really close relationships within the Pulaski community where our students would be doing community-type events, where we would be able to share about our mission.
“Probably more importantly, our upper grade level would be actually out in the community helping local businesses, helping local community members. That would look like sometimes raking for community members who aren’t able to do that, or shoveling, or helping out at the community center, things like that.”
In Green Bay, Rockey explained, GCA hopes to reach the same level of community involvement they did in Pulaski, where they identified needs in the community and worked to meet them.
“That’s definitely something that we’re looking forward to — finding and cultivating relationships like that,” she said.
The building GCA used in Pulaski had been for sale while the school was renting it, and it sold this past year, leading the administrators to begin searching for a new building.
While looking for a new building to rent, Rockey said, “our Head Administrator Jeremie Johnson was speaking with other Green Bay community members about bringing a Christian school that follows a similar model that GCA has to the Green Bay community. We had been looking and praying about it and talking with our families, because it is a move… and through that process we found this property on Kellogg Street.”
GCA’s new property in Green Bay is located at the Annunciation school facility, where Providence Academy was previously located.
Rockey added, “The space that they were using had not yet been utilized for anything else, and it ended up being a real blessing and a great opportunity for us to meet some needs that were identified in the Green Bay community and to meet the need that we had for building and a new home.”
As a school funded solely by donors and fundraising, GCA has no curriculum requirements imposed by the state.
According to Rockey, this freedom in determining their curriculum has allowed the school to deeply commit themselves to their values, something she sees as a draw for incoming families.
“I feel very passionately about this school just because it’s so well aligned with my core values,” she said. “We’re really reaching out to families who have similar Christian values and want to see their children raised up in that way.”
For Rockey, the teachers and administrators at GCA are a large reason for its success.
“What I have experienced from all of the staff and administration is there is a wonderful stewardship of responsibility of coming alongside families and teaching them and discipling them. What I mean by that is all children have challenges, whether it’s academically or socially, and the teachers do such a great job of coming alongside students… and helping them to get to the root of the problem and helping them to overcome it and achieve success.
“Probably all of our families look at that as such a great benefit; we know that all of the teachers and administration and volunteers, everyone really cares about each other and each other’s children. We just really operate out of that love.”
Enrollment for Grace Christian Academy is open until July 4.
To learn more, visit https://gracechristiangreenbay.org