Royal Stories: Mike Grabendike | Parent Testimonial
Transcription
[00:06] My daughter, Hannah has been here since the beginning of her sophomore year. Well, we started uh, she did ninth grade at one of the big public high schools here in Riverside. We began to see fairly early on in that process that just the overall atmosphere that she was dealing with, there was something that was overwhelming her. Uh, they was no rules or restrictions with regards to the cell phones. There was no dress code. Um, these are not in and of themselves negative things, but in a cumulative effect where you’ve literally got up to 3000 kids on a single campus, it just created a chaotic environment that was not going to be very good for her. As a parent, you start to see some of the red flags and you start to think to yourself, if I don’t make this change that I’m really putting my daughter’s future at risk.
[00:59] So that’s what we did. Uh, the day that we came over and took our tour, Mr. Sullivan actually was the one who conducted that tour. And there were three things that stood out to me initially. Uh, that had me walking away going, okay, that’s exactly what I wanted here. And number one was, we have a dress code. We do have a dress code and we enforce the dress code. We don’t allow electronic devices to be used during school hours. So there will be no kids walking around between classes on their phones. They’ll be no kids texting one another during the class time because they’re a distraction.
[01:41] Um, that obviously was a huge positive to me as well. The third question that got asked and got answered, dealt with, you know, as part of the school curriculum, how do you deal with, with kids of this age and kind of the current cultural events and changes and social changes that everybody’s dealing with in the real world. And his answer was, was, was, was very spot on for me. He said, “we don’t ignore them. We can’t. Um, so they do become a topic of conversation when appropriate in the appropriate class. But here’s my promise to you. We will talk about it. The kids will be given an opportunity to share their thoughts and their feelings on it. But I can guarantee you that the last thing they hear on that topic when they walk out of the classroom will be the biblical truth and application to that subject matter”.
[02:40] Now for me, uh, at at that moment is I walked away. It was okay, this, this makes sense. I like this. We know we weren’t going to be bashful about the truth. Um, which was, was of great importance to me. I, watched her struggle initially with the workload, but, you saw in her this growth that began to take place based on the way that she’s been challenged and because of the way that it was structured to, to learn how to critically think she’s as prepared now, um, is I could ever hope that she could be, um, to take that on. If I walked in here with the question, is this the right place for her? I walked out of here knowing that it was.
