I want to begin with stating that I firmly believe in and respect the educational product Classical Conversations offers to homeschooling families. We have learned so much during our three years with CC and we have very much enjoyed our community days. The memory work is strong material that has helped us grow into true grammarians. We have met wonderful friends and have had the opportunity to be led by and learn with like-minded families. In many ways, Classical Conversations gave me the confidence I needed to homeschool in the beginning.

But I’ve also witnessed some very unprofessional actions within the management team over the past several months that have led me to question our participation with CC. While our director did a very good job leading the community, the management team above her seemed to have personal differences with her that hindered their ability to manage effectively. These personal differences snowballed into several uncomfortable situations that negatively impacted everyone in our community. This resulted in a lot of stress and half of the participating families withdrawing in the spring. Despite all of this, our director worked diligently to keep our community together. Our family supported her wholeheartedly and wanted to remain with our CC community because we valued our relationships and believe in the CC product. However, our director ultimately announced her resignation last week because (in my personal opinion) the management team was unwilling to work with her. I will not write about the details, but this experience has saddened me greatly. Personal differences should not have such negative and widespread consequences. I’ve shared my concerns with the local manager (to which I received no response back in the spring), and also with our Regional Manager.

I do earnestly hope that CC will eventually resolve their management issues. But we will not be returning to Classical Conversations because we don’t want to put anymore effort into supporting this management team. The window for schooling my children is finite, and there are only so many hours in day. I am disappointed because we truly love and value our CC family. But after a lot of prayer and many discussions, we know this is the best decision for our family. We are still committed to educating our children in the classical tradition and will be forming a new local group with another family using memory work published by Claritas Classical Academy and digitized by Cross Seven. We aren’t excited about a change after three years with CC, but I actually like several aspects better about their material. They offer four 28-week cycles, which include scripture and hymn memorization, in addition to all of the other subjects. The history sentences line up with the Story of the World curriculum, which will streamline our history studies. Also, there is a greater variety of memory work in all subjects. Once we get over the initial hurdle of the memory work change, I think we are going to be very happy!

I will continue to keep my Classical Conversations blog posts up so that other families can use them, but my readers will not see any more CC-related posts. I will definitely be blogging about our new homeschool adventure though! I am excited to start working with the new material and I am eagerly anticipating our new community’s formation. We are looking forward to a successful new school year!

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