FoCCS participates in the Science Olympics at MOSI, and recently, first-grader Spence Palmer was one of the award winners. “We take what’s really working out there and use it to educate (our) students,” Snow says. FoCCS also offers three high school credits - in Science, Spanish I and Algebra I - and Snow estimates that 98 percent of the students who graduate the eighth grade leave with all three credits. The school is an active participant in the National Junior Honor Society (NJHS) in fact, Snow estimates that 80-90 percent of her students are members of the NJHS. The school also complies with and exceeds the Florida Sunshine State Standards as well as the Hillsborough County Benchmarks set for each of FoCCS’s nine grade levels.

FoCCS is fully accredited by the National Lutheran Schools Association (NLSA). “Those are the people (who) allow God’s love to show through them.”Īcademic achievement is another ingredient in the school’s success. “(Our) parents are the first ones to go out in the community,” Snow says. In addition to helping at the school itself, FoCCS parents, students and administrators participate in community outreach programs, including partnering with Metropolitan Ministries in central Tampa to help feed the homeless. “Most (families) do more (than the 20 hours), some go way beyond and are always searching for opportunities to serve others in the community.” “(Volunteer hours) are an integral part of the school’s success,” Snow says. Those hours can be logged in the classroom, at open house events or during any of the many fund-raising events the school participates in each year. Parents of FoCCS students are asked to put in 20 hours of volunteer work annually for the school. The school couples community service with academic achievement.

“There hasn’t been a day that I don’t want to come in here and see these faces,” Snow says with a smile. Snow also notes that 95 percent of the staff that was present when she took over in 2005 is still at the school today. “It’s been a tremendous amount of growth,” Snow says. The school now educates 177 children, more than doubling the student population under Snow’s watch. When Snow arrived in 2005, after helping establish Grace Episcopal Pre-School in New Tampa, there were already 79 students ranging from Kindergarten through fifth grade at FoCCS. “God has blessed us more than anything I could have imagined,” Snow says. The school has continued to add grades, and today, FoCCS includes kindergarten through eighth grade. “We are looking to be a light that stands out in the community.”įamily of Christ has stayed the course. “Our goal was to add one grade every year,” FoCCS principal Jennifer Snow says. At the time, all Haara and his followers had was a church, a Pre-K and Kindergarten class and a mission. In November of 1999, Family of Christ Christian School (FoCCS), part of Family of Christ Lutheran Church, led by Pastor Dave Haara, purchased 31 acres of land in Tampa Palms. Getting in on the ground floor of the population boom was a tiny Lutheran Church with big ideas. From 1990-2000, the population in New Tampa increased by 273 percent, from 7,145 residents to 26,634, according to the Hillsborough County City-County Planning Division. was a two-lane, eight-mile “road to nowhere.”Īs we all know, that changed quickly. New Tampa was a vastly different place in the early 1990s, home to more wildlife than people, more trees than homes and Bruce B. Story and photos by Andy Warrener Family of Christ Christian School principal Jennifer Snow (r.), with Kelli Tully, the director of Pure Hearts Rescue of New Tampa, on Great American Teach-In day at the school.

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