Giving you more time with your children.
Our mission is to partner with parents in the education and spiritual formation of their children by providing a collaborative education taught from a Biblical worldview.
Our Story
In the fall of 2024, we (Amy Gannett and Tiffany Shepard) started exploring what it would look like to bring the collaborative model of schooling to Greenville and Winterville. With our own children approaching Kindergarten and 1st grade, we knew we wanted them to experience the best of traditional schooling and the best of homeschooling.
From this desire grew a passion project to launch Evergreen Christian Academy in the fall of 2025 to serve families in our area. With a vision to begin with Kindergarten and 1st grade, we prayed and discerned with others, met with interested families, visited schools in the Triangle area, sought coaching from Hybrid schools around the country and more. In a matter of weeks, the Lord made it abundantly clear that He was moving this project from a vision to reality. And we couldn’t be more grateful.
Founding Vision and Mission
Vision
By the grace of God, our graduates will be disciples of Christ who love truth, goodness, and beauty; walk in God’s wisdom and virtue; and use their education to further Christ’s Kingdom.
Our Mission
Evergreen Christian Academy will, Lord willing, be a Christian collaborative school that partners with parents (co-teachers) in a distinctively Christian and uniquely collaborative private school serving the Greenville and Winterville areas, to biblically and collaboratively train their children to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. We disciple students by equipping them with the skills necessary for discerning truth and pursuing wisdom. Our students will purposefully and passionately influence their communities for Christ by evaluating all human knowledge and experience in light of Scripture, and will delight in the world God has made and how he has created them to uniquely participate in his mission in the world.
Our School Values
The Gospel is central in all we do. The message that salvation is found in Jesus alone really does change everything (Colossians 1:15). As such, we seek to embed the message of the gospel in every aspect of what we do so that our education isn’t just about information, but about formation of the young hearts and minds entrusted to us.
Relationships matter because people matter. We believe in building strong relationships between parents (co-teachers), teachers and students so that every aspect of a student’s education is relational in nature. To this end, we maintain small class sizes and encourage a collaborative learning environment within the central classroom and the home classroom. We also believe that it is good for families to be together, which is why our model exists in the first place; we want parents and kids, as well as siblings, to develop deep and bonding relationships with one another.
Screen-free education that allows students to engage with each other and their teachers in a more meaningful way; when technology is utilized for a unique learning experience, it is always governed by a teacher and strategic for learning (never for entertainment). As students enter middle school, technology may be used to teach essential skills like typing, research, written communication, and more, but is always for learning purposes and overseen by an educator. The school will, at all grade levels, be a phone free zone.
Cultivating curiosity so as to develop life-long learners. This means we seek to include (in these early stages) as much exploration and play-based learning as possible. We desire to implement classical education elements for enrichment at each level to train kids to seek what is good, true, and beautiful as they grow to be disciples of Christ who walk in wisdom.
Discipleship begins in the home, and we want to come alongside parents in this, their primary calling. We believe that parents (not the school) are the primary discipleship force in a child’s life, but we want to support parents as they lead their kids in the Lord.
Local church involvement is essential for families to grow in the Lord, which is why we require our families to be involved in a local church. The school can never replace the church in terms of providing Christian community, discipleship, teaching, and more, and we expect that our families will serve and grow in the context of the local church first, and at ECA in a secondary way.
Developing resilience in students who are critical thinkers and who know they can do hard things. We want to breed independence and grit through giving students increasing responsibility and autonomy as they grow. We will partner with parents first as co-teachers (elementary), then as tutors (middle school), and finally as supervisors (high school) of their children’s education; with increasing maturity will come increased responsibility and freedom for students.
School Culture Commitment
Passion and Depth
Life contains more than what our culture offers. We believe that God’s world transcends what we can see. Beneath the surface lies a truer life–we must mine for the deeper things. Truth, goodness, and beauty need to be sought out and sifted, often through sweat and sacrifice. When a passion for the deeper things grows in a student, when he tastes the greatest truths, the life-long quest for depth reignites over and over, and the greater glory of Jesus manifests. We satisfy our purpose when passion and depth emerge in students.
Portrait of a Graduate
By the grace of God, our graduates will…
love truth, goodness, and beauty and recognize Christ as the source
seek wisdom and virtue
own their faith and be confident in who God has made them to be
know that they are fully known and fully loved by God
understand they have been created uniquely to apply learning tools and curiosity to
everyday lifeuse their education to further Christ's Kingdom
THE EVERGREEN LIONS
Our School Identity
Not only is North Carolina nicknamed “the land of the longleaf pine” because of the abundance of pine trees, but the well-known evergreen holds a deeper meaning for the foundations of ECA. Just as evergreen trees flourish in season and out of season, we pray our students will grow to flourish in the home, in school, and in the world for the glory of Christ. Furthermore, in the writing world, “evergreen” content is content that is written to stand the test of time. It is more than a reaction to current cultural climate or a “flash in the pan” response to an event; instead, it is content that is reliable, trustworthy, and written to be utilized today, tomorrow, and 100 years from now. That is the kind of training we want to give our students; biblical, lasting truth that will serve them their entire lives.
Our mascot is the Lion. The lion represents many virtues we hope our students embody – courage, passion, strength, dignity, sober-mindedness, and more. But beyond these virtues, the symbol of the lion references the fictional world of C.S. Lewis, who depicted Christ as a lion, Aslan, who is discovered by four children who stumble into his world. These children, who are from our world, find themselves one day tumbling through a wardrobe into an evergreen forest, and into Narnia. Though at the beginning of their adventures they believe that our world is the “real” world and Narnia is a fictional one, they discover with wonder that Aslan’s world is very real and very much alive. The more they spend time with Aslan, the more they dive into his world and see things as they really are.
This is how we want education to serve our students: as a doorway into God’s world – a world that is very much real, and very much alive. We want them to see, with eyes of wonder, all that God has created in this world even as they seek to live as members of his Kingdom, both in this life and in the life to come.
