In August of 2023, three homeschooling mamas spun off a weekly community-based learning group from an existing group to serve families seeking an expressly Christian group. With eight founding families, we successfully met from August through May of the 2023-24 academic, splitting time between Doc Long Picnic Area and a local church. We prayed, celebrated birthdays, sang hymns & folk songs, studied fine artists, composers, poetry, drawing, nature study, & maps, learned a term-based subject (scouting, clay modeling, & folk dance), as well as diving into Shakespeare and Plutarch with our Form II+ students. Despite the challenges that come with undertaking any new endeavor, we had a beautiful year of learning in community capped by a wonderful end-of-year gathering of our families with food, fellowship, singing (hymns and folk songs), and an impromptu recitation.
In the spring of 2024, the leadership team lost two members due to life circumstances, so the remaining leader, Joanna Biava, met with Rachel Morris and Brittany Robinson, mothers from two founding families, to build a new leadership team. It was determined that the group would re-emerge for the next school year with a new name (SCHOLA Fellowship) and a significant organizational change by placing the group under the prayer and headship of the Heritage Christian Fellowship eldership. Before the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year, however, our group discovered a need to minister to home-educating parents of babies and preschoolers. Bethany Milinazzo was brought onto the leadership team to lead our new "Babies, Preschoolers, and Mamas" group. With the blessing of their husbands and church leaders, as well as wise counsel from an advisory of "retired" homeschooling women from the church, the group began the 2024-25 academic year with both existing and new member families. With a venue change to the HCF church building, we studied many of the same subjects as the previous year while expanding our offerings to include some optional afternoon subjects for our Form II+ students (and some much needed free play for our Form I and younger kiddos).