Our Mission
Our mission at Shining Star Christian Schools is to ignite students’ love for learning and their Savior, and lead them to shine at school, home, in the world, and for all eternity.
Our Vision
At Shining Star Christian Schools, our vision is to utilize school choice to fill empty, formerly operating Christian Day Schools with hundreds of children who hear about Jesus every day and receive a high-quality education. In 2014, Shining Star Christian Schools was founded with the belief that no child should go without a Christ-centered, values-centered education. This belief was coupled with the fact that more than a few Christian Day school buildings that were once fully operated by congregations in Milwaukee had sat empty for years.
Shining Star Christian Schools is different from many other excellent individual and network choice schools in that Shining Star takes on the education of children at a parish school, which frees up congregations to focus on ministering to children and families. Furthermore, our lease payments provide valuable resources to the churches so that congregations can invest in evangelism and other important church work. This church partnership model has developed at Abiding Word Lutheran Church, Fairview Lutheran Church, and St James Lutheran Church, where we have grown to serve 450 K-8 students across 3 campuses with a high-quality, Christian education.
Expanding our Vision through the Virtual School
The rapid shift to distance learning forced by the pandemic led our team to envision and pursue innovative ways to expand this excellence into a technology-rich learning environment. In 2020 we launched a pilot program for high-quality, online Christian education. The success of this program gave us reason to expand this offering in the 2021-2022 school year with the launch of a new Christian K-8 virtual school. Shining Star Christian Virtual School will be available not only to children in Milwaukee, but also to children and families statewide through the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program.
The beauty of this vision is the potential to offer high-quality, Christian education to a diverse student body. Rural families with no Christian school available, for example, will be able to enroll in Shining Star’s virtual school, where their children can collaborate and learn with peers from different parts of the state. Individual homes, underutilized schools, and churches anywhere in Wisconsin can host learning pods with a handful of students who will be pupils of virtual learning with support aides on site.
Dedicated, certified teachers develop individualized learning plans for all our students. The pandemic has given us the ideal setting to improve parental capacity to support the academic success of children, even long after the pandemic has relented. We are thankful and excited for the opportunity!