Freeman Academy fundraising to raise teacher salaries, cover students' tuition costs

FREEMAN — It’s not every day you see a kindergarten classroom with only three students.

It’s a rare, more peaceful teacher-to-student ratio that classroom teachers in charge of more students around the state of South Dakota might like to trade for some days, considering the average student-to-staff ratio in the state is 13.9, according to the most-recent statewide data from December 2022.

But at the Freeman Academy, a private Christian school based in Mennonite traditions, that small ratio is something the head of school Brad Anderson and development director Eric Hartel hope to see change in the coming years.

That’s why they’re kicking off a new fundraising initiative, Cultivate 120, to help the school raise money. The goal is $900,000 to cover more tuition dollars at the private school so more potential students can afford to attend, fill the hallways with students, hire and pay more staff for the academy, maintain its historical facilities and purchase more textbooks and curriculum.

Fundraisers like the annual Schmeckfest, a German food festival, on March 15-16, 2024, will be part of that, but Hartel also wants to hold other events, work with news outlets and talk to potential donors one-on-one to get the word out, to connect and to hopefully raise funds.

Tuition at the Freeman Academy is variable, meaning the school can help cover portions of it for students, ranging from the low end in kindergarten of $1,786 to the higher end in high school of $9,357, according to the school’s website.

The school currently has more than 60 students and divides grade levels into kindergarten, combined classes for grades 1-2, 3-4 and 5-6. By seventh grade, students start to have teachers for different subjects like English language arts, science, math, social studies, health, arts, Bible/religion and computer science up through senior year of high school.

Anderson said there’s a lot of benefits to having multi-grade classrooms, and benefits for students staying with the same teacher for two years instead of one.

Freeman Academy is historically strong in the arts, Anderson said, noting almost all of the high school students are in the choir and about two-thirds are in the band.

The combined classrooms and few subject-area teachers make for a smaller student-teacher ratio than the neighboring Freeman public school district’s 13.6 ratio. Anderson said he’d like to see 10% increases to the size of the student body year-over-year.

While Anderson wouldn’t share specifics about the starting or average teacher salary at the private school, he did say the district did recently raise it by several thousand dollars and is in the process to make it more competitive. He also said the salaries had been a $6,000 difference from Freeman public schools, where the average teacher salary was $47,612 as of December 2022.

Hartel estimated salaries are currently more than $40,000, but hopes the school gets to more than $50,000 through this campaign.

Another part of the campaign is to increase the school’s overall budget so it can purchase more curriculum and instructional materials. Anderson estimates that increase is “several times over,” and that purchasing new social studies textbooks for a class of 20 costs “well over $3,000.”

There are several buildings on the Freeman Academy campus, but the main one is the oldest still-standing building in the town of Freeman, Anderson said. Doors opened in 1903, and as the school celebrates its 120th anniversary — hence the name for the campaign — leaders want to make sure they can maintain the historical facility for years to come.

Despite the Mennonite history of the school, Anderson notes the school has a diversity of students and staff from different faiths, religions and cultures.

For example, the school boards international students. Students have come from China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Serbia, Uganda and more, Anderson said, and usually hear about the school through relationships the academy has had with people in other countries.

At a recent basketball game, Anderson recalls that every Freeman Academy player on the court was from a different country. The school also boards students who stay at the academy during the week for classes and return home on the weekends, Anderson said.

Above all, Freeman Academy’s goal is to care for the whole child, not just their academic learning as a student.

“The school has had an impact on a lot of people from a lot of different places for generations,” Anderson said. “It has done that because what we value most of all is a caring and nurturing community. That’s what we invest in with our teachers and staff. That’s what we pay special attention to with student life, with social-emotional learning, with our spiritual programming.”

This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: Freeman Academy starts fundraising campaign to boost teacher salaries