New preschool to open in April

Ormond Beach Observer
Neighbors

A twice-weekly Montessori-based preschool will open at Tomoka United Methodist Church in April, with plans of going daily by fall.

BY MIKE CAVALIERE | ASSOCIATE EDITOR

With 30 years of experience in education, Faithlyn Thiruchelvam opened her first school, the Ormond Beach Union Learning Center, at Riverside Church, in 2005. And now, she’s ready to open her second.

OBULC 2, which she’s planning to call it, will open April 2, at Tomoka United Methodist Church, 1000 Old Tomoka Road, as a two-day-a-week Mother’s Morning Out preschool. By no later than fall, Thiruchelvam intends for the facility to become a full on, daily, Montessori-based, creative-arts facility

“(My first school) is for the riverside people,” she says. “This is for the mainland people.”

In the works about six months, the school landed on Tomoka United’s property after Thiruchelvam toured the grounds and connected with Reverend Kandace Brooks.

“She’s a music person; I’m a music person,” she said. “That’s why we click.”

But the two entities — the church and the school — are separate.

“It’s really more of a rental agreement,” Brooks says. “(But) as we see the value of the program, we may want this to become a ministry of the church.”

And that value could come in the form of crossover families. Brooks says the toughest job for any church is attracting young families. That’s how congregations grow.

“It’s a constant for churches,” she added. “You look around your congregation and say, ‘Who’s not here?’ ... So we simply want to make ourselves available to young families.”

It will also be nice to finally fill some of the church’s empty space, she added. This will mark the first time in Tomoka's history, tracing back to the ’70s, that it will host preschoolers.

For Thiruchelvam’s part, church partnerships help strengthen the Christian-instruction angle of her curriculum, as well as connects her to support outlets, should any of her student’s families come into crisis.

The new school will be staffed by teachers from the first Union Learning Center. One or two new teachers will be hired on expansion.

But, like her other school, Thiruchelvam doesn’t intend the student body ever to surpass 50 students. She has the lowest student-teacher ratio in town, she says, and she wants to keep it that way.

Elizabeth Flynn, an office worker at Tomoka, agrees with the small-school mentality. Her son, Jude, attended Thiruchelvam’s first school about seven years ago. He learned how to read and write music, how to hold a pencil, he refined his motor skills, and when he reached Kindergarten at Pine Trail Elementary, he fast-tracked right into the gifted program. Now, at Ormond Beach Middle, he has qualified for a state competition in MathCounts, where he’s the only sixth-grader on a team of eighth-graders.

Flynn feels that he owes a lot of that success to good preschooling.

When Thiruchelvam opened her first center, she put her own money into planting trees on the grounds, building a fence, making improvements. People told her she was crazy, she says. But she never saw it that way.

“I did it for God,” she said. “Because this is God’s place.”

Call 672-6722.