Westside Baptist Church plans to open a new K-8 Christian school in the fall, and already applications are pouring in. 

“Our mission as a church is to help parents in raising their kids,” David Chauncey, lead pastor of Westside Baptist Church, said in a phone interview. “And part of that is educating their kids and disciplining their kids. So this really helps parents do both, because they can educate their kids in a Christian environment and their kids can learn all the subjects with a Christian worldview.” 

Chauncey said there is a lot of demand for a Christian school in the area, and that others have waiting lists. Westside has many classrooms that are only used on Sunday mornings, and Chauncey said Westside partly decided to start the school in order to be a good steward of its facilities. 

The original plan for the K-8 school was to start with only a kindergarten and a sixth-grade class, then add a grade each year as those students move up. Chauncey said that plan fell by the wayside when the church realized how much demand there was for all of the grades. 

Because the school is still in its early stages of receiving applications, Chauncey said he does not know how many students it will accept. 

Any parent of any K-8 student is welcome to apply on the church website. The first wave of applications closed on Jan. 15, but Chauncey said people can still apply in a second wave, “the earlier the better” so the church can get a better idea of how many grades it can open in the fall. 

Chauncey said one of the challenges of starting a school is finding qualified teachers, specifically professing Christians. He said several have already expressed interest in working at the new school, and the church is working to recruit more. 

Church member Brad Burklew is to serve as principal for the new school. Burklew taught elementary school grades for 15 years at Shell, Talbot and Norton Elementary schools. He served as an assistant principal at Metcalfe Elementary and Eastside High School. 

For 17 years, Burklew was a principal at Waldo Community School, Talbot Elementary, and Meadowbrook Elementary, which he opened in 2012. He has undergraduate and graduate degrees in Elementary Education and Educational Leadership from the University of Florida and has been a Westside member for 32 years. 

Burklew was moving toward retirement from the public school system, and Chauncey said that timing coincided perfectly with the church’s thought to open a school. 

“We do a lot of ministry on public school campuses,” Chauncey said. “And that has been a lot of our focus, and we’re going to continue to do ministry and really support our public schools and our public school teachers… so we’re not de-emphasizing that, we’re just adding an alternative that a lot of people are looking for.”