Today is the last day of this semester’s programs.  We ended Twinkle on Monday, Glow on Tuesday and Sparkle will finish up today.  Nine of our ten programs will be on hiatus for the summer; our dessert Bible study for our high school juniors and seniors (we call it Glow At Nite) will continue through the summer with myself and some other Cleveland-based Starlite people leading it. 

We hate having to close the programs for the summer, but since we operate actually in the public schools, we really don’t have a choice.  Also, most of our volunteers go “home” for the summer, leaving just a handful of us to keep things running at the office.  Good thing we have Snuggles and Cuddles around to answer the phones.

My schedule won’t slow down with the programs stopping… it will just be a different schedule.  I’ll be doing a lot of fundraising during the next couple of months as we still haven’t fully funded our ’08-’09 budget yet.  We do our budget oddly — we have a “school year budget” that runs from August to April and a “summer budget” that runs from May to July.  Our biggest challenge (obviously) is funding the school year budget, so I work hard on it during the summer.  I’ll also be doing a bunch of other stuff that gets pushed off to the summer months. 

The other big part of the next few weeks is deciding which new schools we’ll be entering in the fall.  I love it when people tell me that I have the greatest job because I “get summers off.”  The reality is that our programs may be ending this week, but this week also began the first series of meetings about this coming fall.  I’ll write more about this later, but we’re currently looking at 12 additional elementary schools in our area and trying to decide how many to take on this fall. 

Side note: Typing that last sentence was unreal.  I can’t tell you how long we spent trying to find a school, ANY SCHOOL, to let us bring our program into.  The fact that we are now being approached by the schools is a real-life miracle, in my opinion.

One of the ironic things about my job is that, since we’re still a relatively young ministry (entering 6th year this fall) with, um, two staff members, I have to be able to look at both the big picture and still pay attention to the small details too.  A good example of this is figuring out a retention system — how are we going to get our current 3rd grade girls to still be with us when they’re seniors in high school?  Once we’ve got that goal set, I start working with our team to figure out specific ways to keep them with us during the “big transitions” (such as moving from elementary school into middle school and then middle school to high school). 

In the town we’re based out of, we have programs in every single middle school and every single high school.  So, when they’re entering middle or high school, we can automatically know that we’ll be wherever they go next.  If you remember, God gave us the vision for the middle school program first, the high school program next and the elementary school program last.  Until recently, that order has never made sense to us but now it is very clear: if we had of had the elementary school program first and not had any middle school programs, we would have lost that relationship that we would have spent three years building.  I love being able to look back and see how God ordered things perfectly, even if we had no idea what He was up to at the time.

And so, summer begins for me at 5:01 p.m. today, right as the last middle school girl heads out the door.  I’ll miss all of our girls, but I’m also looking forward to having more time to work on the administrative side of the ministry. 

Okay, you caught me.  I’m really just looking forward to having a break from the processed nacho cheese.