When Twyla Sanders’ nephew needed a new school she knew exactly where to send him — Christian Outreach Education (OCE) where her two children already attended.
But figuring out how to pay for her nephew’s tuition was a much more difficult question.
“We just simply wouldn’t have been able to afford it,” she said. “Someone would probably have to have gotten a second job. There’s absolutely no way would have been able to afford tuition each month without the MOScholars scholarship.”
The MOScholars scholarship program is a new program that provides up to $6,375 in funding for students with special needs or low-income students to attend private schools.
Thanks to that scholarship Twyla’s nephew has seen tremendous academic growth now that he has found a school that fits his learning style.
“We found out right after he started, because of all the personal attention he’s able to get at this school, that he was more behind than we thought he was,” said Sanders. “We realized that he was 3 to 4 grade levels behind.”
Sanders believes that moving her nephew to OCE will set him on a much better trajectory for life.
“It’s absolutely life-changing,” she said, noting that since her nephew is in ninth-grade they were able to turn his academic career around just in time. “Since he is here we’re able to save him. When you get to high school that’s when the grades start to matter.”
She said the major difference was the smaller size of classrooms and the individual attention her nephew is able to receive at OCE.
“The school was able to basically make an individualized plan for him that can be a little aggressive but it can bring him current,” Sanders said. “He likes the personal attention and just having a teacher being able to sit down and answer questions and do the work with him directly. It has made all of the difference.
“One of the issues that he was running into at his last school was that if he didn’t understand something he was too embarrassed to ask” she added. “You have this whole class full of kids you know. He didn’t want to ask the teacher in front of thirty kids a question that he may have considered a dumb question. Here you can ask those questions.”
And all of that personal attention has really paid off for Sanders’ nephew.
“He has made huge improvements just in the two months he has been at school,” she said. “He actually enjoys learning. He enjoys doing his homework. He enjoys doing his spelling words and all the different assignments that he has. He enjoys coming home and showing us his test scores and pretty much everything has been an A because he’s so been working hard.”
Sanders offered a special thank you to the people who have made the scholarship possible by converting their state taxes into scholarships (learn more about how YOU can do this).
“They are literally changing lives,” she said. “They just can’t understand the impact of what they are doing. This is definitely life-changing. There are children out there who if they don’t have this opportunity they could easily turn into a statistic. For those that already have an edge, it seems like something simple, but it’s really not. Without their money, this wouldn’t be possible for a lot of children.”