Archer Christian Academy

"A Young Archer"
Govaert Flinck
c. 1639–1640
Oil on oak panel
66.2 cm × 50.8 cm

On the way to pick up a friend flying to Chicago, I suddenly realized I was headed to the wrong airport! And it was not the first time this had happened to me. One would think a seasoned Chicagoan like myself would have learned by now; when flying to or from Chicago, one of the first questions you must ask is to which airport you will travel: O’Hare or Midway? Often, that decision is based on cost: which airline offers the cheapest route? Sometimes it is based on flight availability, looking for a direct flight from one’s home airport. Or it could be based on their final destination within the city: do they want to end up further north or further south?
Parents consider similar logistical factors when deciding where to send their children to school. The decision is often: public or private? In Englewood, that choice is: traditional public school or charter school? They weigh the options based on location, safety, and available programs, much like comparing the routes and conveniences of O’Hare and Midway.
However, there is another option that most people do not even know exists. If you want to fly into Chicago, you are not limited to the major commercial hubs. Just north of O’Hare is Chicago Executive Airport. You will not find Delta or United flights landing on its runways. Instead, it services private aviation companies such as SC Aviation. I have never picked up anyone at Chicago Executive Airport. I did not even know it existed until I Googled it today.
For our families in Chicago, Classical Christian school is the educational equivalent of Chicago Executive Airport. In Englewood, the concept of a private education is so foreign that it would be like me trying to book a flight on SC Aviation. I did not even know the airline existed, let alone how to navigate booking a flight.
This is precisely the barrier we are working to overcome at Archer. We desire to introduce our community to this hidden option. We want to show families that they are not limited to the standard terminals of traditional education. There is a destination that prioritizes not merely standard test scores, but the cultivation of the soul.
But, just as booking a private charter flight is cost-prohibitive for the average traveler, private education is financially out of reach for most of our families. The tuition and the required resources present insurmountable barriers.
They need you. Your financial support acts as the ticket that grants these children access to an education they otherwise could never attain. By contributing, you are helping us navigate this unfamiliar process for these families and guiding them to an educational path that will shape their character for a lifetime. We are asking you to help us open the doors to this new educational destination for students who have only ever known the standard routes.
Please consider partnering with us today to help provide this life-changing opportunity for the children of Englewood: partner.archerchristian.org

It's a Thursday afternoon and I'm sitting in the back of our after-school tutoring room, trying to be invisible.

Our tutors are extraordinary people. Patient. Trained. Genuinely devoted to these kids. And they are losing. Not for lack of effort — but because the children in front of them arrived already carrying something no tutoring session can fully address: the accumulated weight of a school day inside a system that is not built for them.

I watch a boy — maybe nine years old, bright eyes, sharp as a tack when he talks about the things he loves — stare at a worksheet like it's written in a foreign language. Because in some ways, it is. The gap between where he should be and where the system has left him is not one tutoring session wide. It is years wide. And it widens every day.

According to the state report card, fewer than 1 in 5 Chicago students can perform grade-level math. Nearly half of all CPS students missed more than ten percent of their school year. In Englewood, those numbers get worse. This is the environment our tutors are trying to remediate — and God bless them for it. But you cannot re-aim an arrow mid-flight. Not entirely.

I sat there in that room and heard something I can only describe as a calling breaking open inside me: What if we aimed them true from the start?

Not intervention. Formation.

Not remediation. Education — whole-person, Christ-centered, classical education, from kindergarten forward, in the heart of this community.

That moment is why Archer Christian Academy exists. It was not a comfortable moment. I told many people afterward that I didn't want to start a school. But God is not always in the business of asking us what we want.

We are building the school that changes what happens in that room. Not at 3:47 in the afternoon — but at 8:00 in the morning, when the arrow is still being formed.

Join us: partner.archerchristian.org

Archer Christian Academy will change Englewood. Not fix it — change it. Through young men and women who grow up loved, formed, and aimed at something worthy. Who choose to stay. Who build businesses, lead churches, raise families, and send their own children to school here. That is where this ends.

But let me take you back to where it started.

For over four decades, our ministry has served families in Englewood with compassion and faith. We've fed the hungry, counseled the broken, walked beside mothers who were holding everything together with nothing but prayer and grit. That work has been a privilege and a calling. And for a long time, I told myself it was enough.

Then I sat down in our after-school club.

I watched our dedicated tutors try to inspire children who were already — at three o'clock in the afternoon — exhausted. Not from play. From the weight of a system that had been grinding them down since the bell rang at eight. A system where, according to the latest state report card, fewer than 1 in 5 Chicago students can do grade-level math. Where among low-income Black students, that number drops closer to 1 in 10. Where nearly half miss more than ten percent of the school year — not because they don't care, but because the system has stopped making a compelling case that they should show up.

I had been mending arrows that were already in the air. Doing my best to course-correct trajectories already locked in. And I realized with a clarity I hadn't asked for: that is not enough.

What if we became the Archer — the steady hand that aims true from the very beginning?

That is Archer Christian Academy. A Christ-centered, classical school in the heart of Englewood, built not to produce test scores, but to form whole persons — mind, body, and soul — who live wisely, lead courageously, and serve their community for the glory of God.

The ending I described? The Englewood renewed by a generation of servant leaders?

We're building the beginning right now. And it starts with your partnership. You can join us here: partner.archerchristian.org

"I've stood with too many families around caskets that should have been graduation stages."

I wrote that sentence down after a funeral. A young man from our neighborhood. Not a stranger — someone we knew, had served, had hoped for. He was nineteen.

I don't share that to manipulate you. I share it because it is the irreducible truth of what drives everything we're building at Archer Christian Academy. For over four decades, Englewood Family Outreach has served this community — and I have learned, in the most sobering possible way, that programs and compassion, as vital as they are, cannot outpace a system that is failing children before they ever arrive at our door.

Here are the numbers behind the grief: fewer than 1 in 3 Chicago public school students can read at grade level. Fewer than 1 in 5 can do grade-level math. Among Black students in the low-income neighborhoods we serve, the math proficiency rate is barely 1 in 10. And this is after the city declared victory over pandemic learning loss.

Something is profoundly, structurally broken. And it is not the children.

The children in Englewood are made in the image of God. They are curious, capable, resilient beyond measure. What they are missing is not aptitude — it is an education worthy of who they are. An education that does not merely prepare them for a workforce, but forms them as whole persons. An education ordered toward wisdom, virtue, and the glory of God.

That is what Archer Christian Academy is. A Christ-centered, classical school where every child is treated as the arrow they are — carefully crafted, intentionally aimed, and launched toward a life of purpose.

The caskets and the graduation stages. We are in the business of converting one into the other.

Will you help us build the school that does it?

Join us: partner.archerchristian.org

There is a child in Englewood right now who is four years old. She is curious and alive and full of everything a child made in God's image should be. In a year or two, she will walk into a classroom for the first time.
That moment — the first classroom — is not neutral. Research tells us what we already know in our bones: the educational trajectory set in those early years is extraordinarily hard to change. By third grade, reading proficiency predicts high school graduation. By middle school, math proficiency predicts economic stability. And in Chicago's public schools, fewer than 1 in 3 students read at grade level. Fewer than 1 in 5 can do grade-level math.
In Englewood, those numbers get worse. In a neighborhood with a homicide rate ten times higher than the city average, where poverty and educational failure and community violence form a knot that no single program can untangle, the stakes of that first classroom cannot be overstated.

We cannot wait.

Archer Christian Academy is building a Christ-centered classical school in the heart of Englewood. We will open our doors to the first class of students in the fall of 2027. Our curriculum will form students not just as learners but as whole persons — in mind, body, and soul. Our teachers will be mentors and disciples, not just instructors. Our families will be partners in a covenant, not just customers in a transaction.

The cost to educate a student here will be significant. By the grace of God and the generosity of ministry partners, we will ask families for a tuition commitment of just $100 a month — because we believe no mission-aligned family should ever be turned away for lack of funds.

That four-year-old girl will walk into a classroom in two years.
We are building one that is worthy of her.

Will you stand with us? partner.archerchristian.org

Four out of five children in Chicago public schools cannot perform at grade level in math. Fewer than 1 in 3 can read at grade level.
Read that again. In the third-largest city in the United States, with a school budget approaching $8 billion dollars, the majority of children are being passed through a system that is not actually teaching them.

And here's the part that breaks my heart most: we know it. The data is published every fall. The grief is real. The calls for reform are constant. And yet the trajectory for generation after generation in communities like ours remains largely unchanged.

I have spent twenty-five years in Englewood — one of Chicago's most persistently underserved neighborhoods — watching brilliant, God-made children grow up inside that trajectory. I have watched children who were curious and capable at age five become disengaged by age ten, not because they changed, but because the system failed them at every turn. I have stood at funerals for young men who, by every measure of human potential, should have been standing somewhere else entirely.

Here is the other statistic no one puts in the report card: Englewood has a homicide rate ten times higher than the city average. Violence and educational failure are not separate problems. They are the same broken trajectory, playing out across a human life.

We are not here to offer another program. We are not here to tutor children after a failing system has already done its damage. We are here to build something different from the ground up: Archer Christian Academy, a Christ-centered classical school in the heart of Englewood where every child is treated as the image-bearer of God they are — and educated accordingly.

The data defines the problem. The Gospel defines the response.

Join us: partner.archerchristian.org