The founders of New Stonemoor Academy are husband and wife team Nick and Stacy Vaka.
As a child, Nick was always so eager to understand what he was learning that he would often ask frustrating questions of his teachers, who just wanted him to sit down, be quiet, and listen to the lesson. Unfortunately for them, he was not the kind of child who could learn by being quiet and listening, and eventually his mother realized that the schools were not equipped to adapt to his particular learning style. As a result, he and his siblings were homeschooled fourth grade through high school.
The setting was Colorado in the 1990s to early 2000s, when the idea of homeschooling was still strange and uncommon. The public schools gave Nick’s mother so much grief about pulling her children out of school that she ended up incorporating herself as a private school so that they’d leave her alone. She named the school Stonemoor Academy after the neighborhood in which they lived. The school had three students: Nick, his twin sister, and their younger brother. Today all three siblings are successful, responsible adults with families of their own.
Flash forward a few years when we were blessed with a daughter who is exactly like her father, and we thought if homeschooling were good for him, why not for her? Why put our daughter through the same struggles as her dad when she could get just as good an education (or better) at home?
And so New Stonemoor Academy was born. Our goal is to provide educational support that address the needs of the whole child: spiritual, intellectual, and physical, in a way that fosters faith in God, love of family, and hope for the future.
And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:13
