Once again, the sounds of children learning and playing will reverberate throughout Waldo City Hall’s Noe Wing as Grace Christian Prep School readies to open there in August for the 2026-27 school year.
With a mission that “to reach one is to teach one,” the new K-12 private school marks a victory over the city’s recent history of schoollessness.
After the historic Waldo Community School closed in 2015 after 93 years, the city of around 900 residents waited nearly a decade until Constellation Charter School opened in 2023.
The School Board of Alachua County shut down the charter last year, citing safety violations and leaving residents to commute elsewhere in the county for school.
Grace Christian’s Waldo branch celebrated a ribbon-cutting in December as the school’s second location just over a year after the first started in Gainesville at 207 NW 23rd Avenue.
The school’s founder and CEO, Cynthia Walker, said the community is excited and ready to welcome the students.
“They want a school in this community that’s going to make a change in their children,” she said. “Not just in the children [but] in the community as a whole because they’ll ask us to host events and different things to bring the families together. I feel like that’s why we’re here, to bring the community together.”
Walker said the vision for expanding Grace to Waldo came last summer. Her lifelong friend and the school’s principal, Christopher Graham, said God gave him a vision when he drove by the building one day.
He prayed about it, and a few months later they’d rented the space.
“It was a God thing,” Graham said.
With less than 20 days before school starts on Aug. 10, around 60 students have already enrolled at Grace Christian Prep School’s Waldo campus. Registration is still open.
Walker said tuition for the past year added up to $10,474, which is less expensive than other private K-12 options like Oak Hall (up to $24,590) and The Rock ($14,800), but more than some like First Christian Academy ($6,800) and Cornerstone Academy ($8,350).
Grace’s uniform package comes with five sets of outfits at an additional $250, and scholarships are available for all tuition through stepupforstudents.org.
Running on an 8 a.m. to 2:43 p.m. class schedule, the Waldo school’s teaching model will match that of its Gainesville campus, aiming to prioritize a small teacher-student ratio, technology-free methods and inviting parents into the learning process.
Grace offers students in the upper grade levels dual enrollment and Advanced Placement courses using Florida’s college-ready curriculum to prepare graduates for state scholarship eligibility.
New this year, the Lions will add soccer and flag football for sports, as well as speech and debate. Grace will also implement resources for diagnosing autistic students and equipping parents to help.
Walker said staff work to keep students and employees safe with security cameras throughout the school, an officer in the building and partnerships with the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office and Gainesville Police Department.
On top of regular coursework, Walker and Graham said Grace emphasizes the importance of a Christian foundation and carves out the first 30 minutes of the school day to read the Bible.
“It’s education as the whole body,” Graham said. “Now, being a Christian school, when you put God on top of it, it just makes it better. It just puts the icing on the cake for developing the years to come, leaders, and that’s where our concept of Grace comes from.”
Graham said although technology is good, and Grace does integrate it at times, he said he’s seen teachers in public schools use it to replace hands-on learning. He said teachers can’t play YouTube videos in lieu of teaching and expect children to grasp material.
At Grace, Graham said the school prioritizes one-on-one relationships between teachers and students and reading comprehension over theory to help combat Florida’s declining literacy rate crisis.
The Alachua County Comprehensive Literacy Needs Assessment recently revealed that over the course of four years (2020-2021 to 2023-2024), only 50-55% of students in Alachua County were reading on grade level by the end of third grade.
“It’s very easy to put a tablet in front of someone and they can start pressing letters and hearing letters, but they’re not actually understanding what those letters really mean,” Graham said. “So when a parent comes to me and says, ‘Hey, my kid already knows their ABCs,’ I ask, can they sing the song, or can they tell me the ABCs? Two different things.”
Graham said inviting parents into their children’s learning process is key to in-classroom success. He said it requires educating them that school is not daycare, an increasing issue not unique to the U.S.
According to a survey from Kindred Squared, 36% of primary school children in the United Kingdom’s North Eastern region were not toilet trained last year, up 10% from 2024. The survey found that 33% of parents don’t see that as an issue to address.
As children come to Grace Christian Prep School starting at all different levels of education and school readiness, Walker and Graham said patience to meet them where they’re at is key and has already paid dividends at the first location.
When Walker started Grace in 2024 using much of her own money, she said Grace had three teachers teaching 17 students from all walks of life. Walker said it was sad seeing children come from the public school system unable to read or write.
When the first benchmark tests revealed a 27% level of English Language Arts (ELA) proficiency and 25% in mathematics, she said she leaned into trusting God.
“I almost had a heart attack,” Walker said. “I was like, ‘Dr. Graham, what are we doing? What are we doing?’ He said you have to trust the process.”
Sure enough, she said scores increased 50% by the second test post-holidays, and even more by the last test in May, when ELA scores reached 98% and 85% efficiency for math. Heading into year two, Walker said Gainesville Grace’s enrollment numbers have more than quadrupled.
She said the growth has been nothing short of a miracle.
“All of us as a school, we poured into those children. We loved those children,” Walker said. “We were there for those children, not just educating in the classroom; we were educating outside of the classroom as well.”
Walker said staff and the community are excited to see Grace bring similar success to Waldo.
Before retiring in June, former City Manager Kim Worley highlighted the importance of having schools local to a community and said Graham seemed to intuitively know what people are looking for in one.
“It helps keep kids together and not that far from their families,” Worley said. “It just makes for a really good community environment. I’m very excited to have a school here and see it get started, and hopefully grow into something that’ll be really beneficial to this community.”
Ahead of the new year, Walker and Graham are busy meeting with new students and helping them navigate registration.
Walker said Grace is still hiring teachers for Waldo. Many of the school’s current teachers have secondary degrees, but anyone with a bachelor’s degree who is “bold in faith, strong in character and committed to excellence” can email info.graceca@gmail.com with resumes. Pay is based on experience.
Community members and organizations are also encouraged to donate computers and laptops for students to use in testing.
Editor’s note: This story was underwritten by a grant from the Rural Reporting Initiative at the Community Foundation of North Central Florida.
