Esprit newsletter — printed or electronic?
By Shan Hughey and David Tulis
We are considering going online with our areawide homeschool newsletter Esprit. We are weighing this for two main reasons. The first is cost, and the second is convenience. Many of you appreciate or prefer accessing news online.
The cost reason has two sides to it.
To the subscriber, CSTHEA would be able to offer the online or electronic subscriber a lower rate. The other side of the coin is that it would cost less for CSTHEA to produce the newsletter. Currently, we are losing $5,000 a year publishing Esprit. The deficit has grown because of our upgrade in printing services, first-class postage for areas which had been receiving the newsletter late, and as our costs went up while our subscription rate stayed the same.
Having the Esprit available as a download or sent as a PDF would also fit right in to the digital age. Many of us actually prefer to get information that way.
But putting the Esprit online invites a potentially embarrassing problem.
Before we allude further to the problem, we’d like you to think a moment about a homeschool mom named Jan Bontekoe.
A mother of seven children and a bookkeeper for her husband’s business, she manages our homeschool curriculum fair/ expo every year, dealing with vendors, organizing services months in advance and arranging thousands of details that make our July event come off with a profitable bang. She works with the zeal and selflessness of someone on a mission.
How much is she paid?
Well, she’s reimbursed at the same level of executive compensation as our president, Gary Hargraves. His is a big job. As area coordinator, Gary leads our board in many decisions. He oversees the addition of local support groups, sports teams and chess clubs to our main association. He fields calls and takes trips for us. When Gary takes a July vacation, he doesn’t slip off to the beach to enjoy waves. No, every year he devotes a week setting up our homeschool fair at Camp Jordan. He sweats the details and hassles with the precision of an engineer and the doggedness of a Fortune 500 CEO.
Soccer mom Jan Bontekoe is paid the same amount as our long-elected president.
Which is?
Nothing.
We mention these homeschool servants because their desire to improve the lot of homeschooling overall is not shared by everyone.
Little birds have told us that families share subscriptions and photocopy the Esprit. We suspect that many moms are making their own copies of Esprit under the best intentions.
This practice results in fewer paying readers sharing the burden of our expenses as publisher. These readers’s getting an E-Esprit provides to some a fresh way to nab a small savings, especially as the national economy falters and families are becoming increasingly concerned about their financial stability.
Esprit meets a need for our homeschool community. We are able to share prayer requests, information about classes and field trips, cover current legal and legislative issues and print articles that are informative and encouraging.
This is your newsletter. We want to see it continue to bless and serve our homeschool community.
What comes into view when we look up from the tightness of our own billfolds and purses is the larger gain of home education that CSTHEA brings to Christian and other families in the Chattanooga area.
Because this more generous view is strongly operative, we’ve been able to pay for “money losers” such as Esprit and sports. Sports groups, as you might have guessed, are very costly to start. So profuse is the growth in sports that we have engaged a second treasurer, also a volunteer, to handle the workload.
Every dollar pulled in by our biggest source of income, the curriculum fair, goes into activities for area homeschoolers. We are very fortunate to have CSTHEA board members and many others on a strictly volunteer basis who give of their time. That is the role they envisage for CSTHEA: To provide opportunities that you, the homeschool parent or the local support group, cannot do on your own — the curriculum fair, Esprit, graduation, Cornerstones yearbook and so on.
So, it is with a slight sense of trepidation that we ask you to consider whether you’d prefer an electronic version of Esprit or the put-in-your-hands print version.
We wonder how we can encourage all our moms and other readers to support our labors — and encourage others to do the same. Is there enough sense of community among homeschoolers to think of the larger good and support Esprit versus the making of photocopies or PDF duplicates for “poor” but deserving friends?
Is turning Esprit into electrons going to turn it into a financial bust? Or will it make Esprit more widely read than ever, more self-supporting, a greater force for encouragement in Chattanooga?
This is what we are asking.
Speaking of questions, we have a survey on the question of “online” or “print copy” Esprit. Please go to www.csthea.org and tell us what you think — “online” or “print copy”?
It’ll take just a minute or two. Thanks.
Meanwhile, be in prayer for the board as we make decisions regarding Esprit. We desire to be good stewards of the money that the Lord Jesus Christ has provided.
Please participate in our Newsletter survey! Answer a couple of quick “Yes or No” questions and help us shape the future of our newsletter distribution!
Click this link to take our Newsletter Survey.
Please note: you may have to turn off pop-up blockers temporarily to allow the survey to display.