McIntyre Makes Early Learning Profitable

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 27, 2000 | by Stephen Goode

Personal Bio

The McIntyres: Ellsworth and wife Pat as young as Christians.

Currently: Founder and president, Grace Community Schools, Naples, Fla. Pastor, Nicene Covenant Church.

Born: May 26, 1935; Pittsburgh.

Family: Wife, Patricia; five daughters, three sons; 16 grandchildren.

Career: Businessman; ordained minister of the Reformed Presbyterian Church and Christian educator

Education: B.S. in education begun at the University of Pittsburgh and completed at Bob Jones University; M.S. in education from Georgia Southern University that was completed at Johns Hopkins University; a doctorate in education from Faith Theological of Avon, Ind., after completing all but dissertation for a doctorate from the University of Southern California.

Book: How to Become a Millionaire in Christian Education (1997), a spiritual autobiography and the story of McIntyre's experiences (both good and bad) in Christian education, as well as a "how-to" book about setting up a profitable Christian school.

The Rev, Ellsworth E. McIntyre has combined religion and revenue with the three R's of education by marketing affordable day care and elementary education with a Christian curriculum.

The Rev. Ellsworth E. McIntyre, after many often deeply frustrating years in Christian education as a teacher and principal, opened the first Grace Community School in Naples, Fla., 14 years ago. There now are nine of them, offering day care and elementary education in the Naples area. At first, the Grace Community Schools required only that youngsters be potty-trained; now, because many parents have babies as well as potty-trained children, Grace offers care for those still in diapers as well, allowing parents to leave all their children at the school during their own work hours.

McIntyre founded the schools to offer kids courses in reading and math long before they otherwise would encounter those subjects in kindergarten or elementary school. His idea was that children can learn to read soon after they've learned to speak, and that the years from ages 2 to 5 are potentially fruitful ones otherwise wasted. Above all, he wanted to provide a highly structured, stable, Christian learning environment.

The nine schools, which now teach students up to ninth grade, today have about 1,000 students. Altogether, nearly 10,000 have attended classes. Parents, who pay by the week and can remove their children at any time, tend to love the schools. "It's very hard for a parent to deny it's a great school when a 4-year-old child comes home and starts reading the funny papers," McIntyre tells Insight.

Insight: What's making your schools so successful?

Rev. Ellsworth E. McIntyre: I'm charging less money than my day-care competition and providing quality education in addition. It's a classic capitalistic bargain for the housewife: Here she gets low-priced day care and has a literate child by the age of 4.

Insight: How did you come up with your idea for day-care centers that also are schools?

EEM: In the 1970s, when I was teaching junior-high and high school, I was amazed at the deterioration even then in our culture and of the caliber of students we were getting. It occurred to me that, if I really were going to make a change in [children's] lives, I would have to get them as young as possible. In junior-high and high school, an adult teacher has a limited amount of influence because [students] already look to one another and imitate others their age.

But I have noticed -- I have a family of eight children -- that the younger children key in on an adult. Children between the ages of 2 and 5 want to imitate adults rather than one another. That is the great opportunity to mold the character of youngsters, because they're looking toward that adult teacher almost in a godlike trance. The teacher has all the answers. So I concluded that the time for education is early childhood, as early as can be, both from the language standpoint and, particularly, from the moral standpoint.

Insight: How did the profit angle come in?

EEM: I also began to look at it from the economic standpoint because, up to the age of 30, I'd been a businessman, and what I found after I converted to Christ was that almost all the Christian schools I administered were in terrible financial difficulty. Yet here was this tremendous day-care market. There are companies making tremendous profits from day care, but here are Christian schools starting kindergarten at the age of 5 and losing lots of money -- losing lots of money at a time when the natural market for day care that they could provide is slipping through their fingers.

Insight: You teach phonics, which is based on sounds. What do you do when you come to English words such as "ten" and "tin," or more complicated words such as "though" and "rough" that may cause confusion when sounded?

EEM: There are some words you have to memorize. There are lots of things you can't do phonetically in English, but you can nonetheless get a head start. Our language is learned so much more quickly phonetically than it is any other way.