"Your work is preparing the next generation of priests, nuns and parents that will lead the Church in its mission of being light, leaven and salt to the earth." (Mike Puccio)

Dear Mrs. Neill:

My family and I would like to thank you for your continued leadership of St. Michael the Archangel Academy. Your work is preparing the next generation of priests, nuns and parents that will lead the Church in its mission of being light, leaven and salt to the earth.

I would like to share our experience of getting off track of our main homeschooling goal, that of passing a Christian faith onto our children. It started two years ago while our oldest was enrolled at St. Michael the Archangel Academy and money was getting tight.  We listened to our friends talk about all the advantages of the charter home schools and the social network it provided; so we decided to take advantage of the free services offered by these government funded programs.

At first we believed we made a wise decision because we were entitled to “free” schooling since we pay taxes and since good families are doing it; how bad could it be?  Later we noticed that many of the faith experiences that drew us to home schooling were being removed from our busy schedule. No more were we taking our children to daily Mass, our oldest was being taught his First Communion catechism at a mediocre parish program and our home curriculum was slowly getting more and more Godless.  In addition, my wife was so busy trying to keep up with the paperwork demands that the charter school required that there was not enough time to emphasize faith formation.  We know this was not what God intended for Catholic homeschooling.

Less than a year after leaving, we returned to St. Michael the Archangel and God started blessing us immediately when we were asked to host Father Francis’s class. During twelve years of Catholic school education I have never spent more than a few minutes with a priest in the classroom and never dreamed that my boys would have the opportunity to receive weekly biblical teaching and spiritual direction from such a holy priest.

I would like to urge all Catholic homeschooling families to have faith that God will provide the financial means to educate their children and not to enter these charter schools. It is very enticing to think that somehow your child’s education will be paid for but as my wife and I experienced everything has a price.  One example is that when we joined the charter school we were told to order the books we wanted but when we had to present a sample of work, we were told God couldn’t be mentioned.  This may seem trivial but yet it is very profound.  How can I tell my children to deny God for a few hundred dollars?  It is hard enough to bring our children to a Christian faith with the help of schools like St. Michael the Archangel, but it is impossible to do it by bringing public schooling into our homes.

God knows that our families are called not just to create average Christians but soldiers for the Church who will stand up to the temptations of the world.  Courage! God has called each one of us to this Catholic homeschooling mission and He will also provide the means to do it.

In Christ,
Mike Puccio

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