Welcome to the Upper School of Logic and Rhetoric. As Covenant Christian Academy enters its 33rd year, we are also pleased to welcome our 15th graduating class, the Class of 2025. These students have learned the building blocks of a logical argument and the rhetorical styles that make arguments effective and convincing. They have been challenged to read thoroughly, question incisively, think deeply, and reflect authentically. In their daily classroom experiences, as well as capstone projects like Threshold Speeches, Senior Theses, and Academic Travel Week, students are given hands-on opportunities to practice these skills and apply them to their lives. In the end, CCA students are challenged to engage the present intellectual and cultural moment with confidence and hope because they understand the human story, with all of its depth and complexity, in the context of God’s wondrous creation and living Word.
Students in the Logic School receive a strong grounding in the skills necessary to succeed in later academic work and social opportunities to grow as a collaborator and member of a team. Students study core Humanities subjects of Bible, English, History, as well as Latin, Science, Math, and Logic. They have an opportunity to do hands-on work and discover how logic is applied to learning in subjects as diverse as Science, Latin, and History. Each Eighth Grader will make a Threshold Speech on a life-shaping moment that helped them grow and mature. These students are fully ready to embrace the challenges of the Rhetoric School at the end of their eighth grade year.
Students in the Rhetoric School engage in a rich Humanities curriculum around the CCA Round Table that asks them to take charge of their own learning. This they do under the guidance and mentoring of outstanding teachers who are experts in their fields. A specialized Rhetoric course teaches students the “classical arrangement” of an argument and how to make an argument winsome. Year-long lab science courses are offered each year with an expanded period to allow for in-depth exploration and observation as students practice inductive reasoning and the scientific method. Mathematics offerings extend through AP Calculus and include semester electives in Computer Science and Statistics. Latin is also taught through the AP level. Our Rhetoric Students read and discuss Virgil’s Aeneid in 9th grade and then are often translating it from the Latin in 11th grade. All of this is grounded in a comprehensive Bible curriculum that centers around the life of Jesus Christ and how that impacts the head and heart of every Christ follower. Rhetoric students cap their college prep experience with a Senior Thesis and Oral Defense on a topic of their own choosing. This is every bit as rigorous as anything they could face in their first two years of college. CCA graduates go to college brimming with confidence that they are ready, with both heart and mind, to tackle any challenge they may face.
There are wonderful opportunities to exercise creativity in the Fine Arts Program (art, music, drama). Students in both Logic and Rhetoric schools form worship bands that help to lead worship for the weekly chapel services. Students can participate in soccer, volleyball or cross country (fall), basketball (winter), and Ultimate Frisbee or Track & Field (spring). It is important to grow and be challenged physically as well as artistically, mentally and spiritually.
Finally Upper School students have outstanding leadership opportunities culminating in the student prefect program for seniors. Students are chosen from a larger group that apply to be prefects in areas of Academics, Activities, Admissions, Athletics, Chaplin, Fine Arts, Global Community, and Hospitality. These students chair councils made up of younger students and do real work each day to help further the mission of the school. This is one more way our CCA students are challenged to take responsibility for the life of their school.
Worship, prayer, and the study of God’s Word is at the center of all we do at CCA. Each day begins with Homeroom where students can begin their day by encouraging each other and dedicating the day and it’s cares to the Lord. Chapel each week is an opportunity to worship together, listen to God’s Word and pray. The classroom study of the Bible goes beyond the merely academic and challenges each of us to apply the Truth found in the Bible to our own lives.
Welcome again to the remarkable community of faith and learning that is Covenant Christian Academy. We believe it is a special place where young people can grow and be challenged in the areas of the head and the heart under the careful watchfulness of adults who care for them as teachers and mentors. We are a “global community” with local students who are diverse racially, ethnically, and economically, as well as international students from countries like China that have chosen to join our homestay international student program. These are just some of the remarkable opportunities we have to become the kind of community where excellence is prized, God is honored, and we can “grow in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52).
Matthew Offner
Principal
Upper School of Logic and Rhetoric
Tracy Bennett
Dean of Academics
Upper School of Logic and Rhetoric
Caleb Ingersoll
Dean of Students
Upper School of Logic and Rhetoric
