Colleen Hroncich
“We had kids.” For Nathaniel Pullman, the answer to the question, “Why did you start a school?” is as simple as that. He and his wife Joy attended Hillsdale College. “While we were there, we fell in love with the liberal arts and classical education and all that. And we knew we wanted to give that gift to our kids because neither of us had had it before we went there.”
When their oldest was three years old, they started looking around to see if there was a classical school near them. When they didn’t find anything, they decided they needed to create something. At first, they started a homeschool co-op. “Then we realized we wanted something a little bit more in-depth, more comprehensive, and also to help provide it to other families that couldn’t provide it themselves. So we said, ‘We need to start a school.’ And we did,” Nathaniel explains.
Redeemer Classical School opened in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 2017 with five students, including two of Nathaniel’s kids. They’ve grown a bit every year and are now up to 63 students in grades 1–11. Next year will be the first year with 12th graders. But Redeemer doesn’t use the term “grade” to denote the various levels. “We deliberately tried to separate ourselves from the age-grade stuff that schools do. We try to place kids in their ‘form’ by mastery, capability, and maturity,” says Nathaniel.
Form A (typically ages 6–7) and Form B (typically ages 6–9) meet for half days to give younger kids more time at home with their parents. The full-day program starts with Form 1 (ages 7–9) and goes up from there. The website lists a variety of skills and knowledge kids are expected to have in each Form level to help parents understand the placements. Redeemer is intentionally a rigorous, challenging school, so when kids transfer in, it’s pretty common for them to be placed in a form with kids two or three years younger than they are.
The forms help separate kids into ability groupings, but some subjects are more individualized. “We have a few things that the whole form does together—the memorization and recitation, literature, history, and science. Those things are all kind of done by form,” Nathaniel says. But for math, Latin, grammar, and logic, which depend more on student capabilities, they move kids around to the class that best fits their abilities.
The whole school starts the morning together with a worship service every day before dividing up for classes. After the worship service, the lower school does some exercise to get their brains going. Then they jump into recitation and memorization. “We try to put the stuff that we think is the most important and takes the most mental energy right after some kind of physical exercise,” says Nathaniel. There’s a recess break mid-morning, and then they have grammar, writing, and logic followed by history. The whole school has lunch and recess together, and then the lower school comes back in and does Latin, math, and literature.
Classes are done at 2:45, but the kids don’t leave right away—they clean the school. “We decided that they shouldn’t get this idea that there’s some slave that wanders around behind them cleaning up after them,” says Nathaniel. “We have a list of jobs—these jobs need to be done every day. Everybody lines up in the hallway, and we just start assigning chores.”
The upper school, or high school, follows what Nathaniel calls a university model with instruction in the mornings and independent work in the afternoons. In addition to completing their schoolwork, students can take that time for apprenticeships, internships, jobs, or dual-enrollment college courses.
Nathaniel doesn’t think it’s natural for kids to just interact with kids their own age, so Redeemer students, faculty, and staff are organized into a British-style house system (think Hogwarts in Harry Potter). Students are encouraged to sit with their houses during church services and lunch to foster camaraderie. Throughout the year, students earn or lose points for their house based on academic achievements, service, and behavior.
There are multiple school choice programs in Indiana that help with affordability, and Nathaniel carefully weighs the pros and cons before deciding whether to participate. Since the tax credit scholarship program is privately funded—donors receive a tax credit to help offset their donations—it has few regulations attached to it, so Redeemer does participate.
Indiana’s Education Scholarship Account Program, an ESA, has more requirements, “but they’re mostly on the parents, so we can take the ESA money without very much effort,” Nathaniel says. To be eligible for the ESA, students must be identified as having a special need or be the sibling of a student with special needs. Parents must ensure participating students take the state test.
Redeemer doesn’t participate in the state voucher program because there are many more rules attached to it. That frustrates Nathaniel and the parents at Redeemer because the voucher has nearly universal eligibility and could be very beneficial if it wasn’t so regulated.
Nathaniel says a lot of people call him to ask how to start a school—even within his first year of opening, which he thought was amusing. “The most useful advice that I think most people get from me is that your school doesn’t have to look like a public school. It doesn’t have to look like the school you went to,” he says. He encourages potential founders to decide what they want their school to be and then make it as close to that as possible rather than trying to make it look like what someone else—including the local public school or the state—says it should look like.
