With faith at heart, New Life Uplifted grows in Clinton

For local Rev. Regina Lucious, what started out as homeschooling evolved into her very own private school for at-risk students in Sampson County, one she named New Life Uplifted School.

“At that time, I noticed that the mental state of the children was changed and a lot of them were going to school but they couldn’t catch it,” Lucious said on how it all began. “I had one myself, and so, I went to all the meetings trying to get him a IEP (Individualized Education Program). Even then, typically he was just going to school but wasn’t growing so I said, ‘You know what, let me start homeschooling.’”

While doing that and serving as pastor of New Life Outreach Ministries, she began to see other children attending the church in similar situations.

“Being a pastor, when your children start coming through the church and I saw them in that same situation, I said I’m going to homeschool them too,” she said. “After I started homeschooling more, next thing I knew I ended up with six students.”

That was eight years ago and since then that idea has transformed into New Life Uplifted School, which now has more than 40 students. A school designed to reach out to students who are at risk academically and have intellectual disabilities.

As a fully licensed private school, New Life runs Monday to Thursday from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., getting off early Friday’s at 12 p.m., offers grades Pre-K through 12 and provides courses set by North Carolina Standards Curriculum.

”We have computer classes which starts in 8th grade up to 12th grade, we all have African American history and we even do biology starting in eighth grade,” Lucious said. “We do not just ELA (English Language Arts) but we do reading and writing. Much like how it was from the movie “Freedom Writers”, we kind of navigate off of that movie to teach the children properly how to write, we also we teach cursive.

“I have a guy to do our online functions — with that they go online, they login, they do the lessons and turn them in on Tuesdays and Thursday. Then typically on Fridays they test and that’s every Friday because we want to make sure whatever they learned that week they retain it. After testing Friday we get out early at 12 p.m. then we go to the church for devotion and we feed them, and no, we have no feeding programs. Needless to say, they learn it all and we do quite a lot here.”

They not have feeding program and she also receives no funding to keep her school operational, remaining active solely on faith and church support.

“We offer the school for at-risk children but we don’t get funded, this church and myself sponsor these children,” she said. “We are operating off of faith, as it’s been a private school. Technically I have only six that get scholarships the other children are sponsored though us. So I work out here free, I don’t get paid, but I work every day and sponsor these children. Tuition is $8,000-some dollars but I have a good church family here to support these children.

“We also work together to make sure the teachers are paid, teachers who have graduated from Fayetteville State, are back at ECU for their school-age license and other just getting their degree. I have two certified childcare workers as well so we’re not just here sitting around playing at being a school.

“We’ve been helping at-risk children for awhile it’s just that nobody knew about this, I‘ve never been exposed. The only one who knew was the mayor and he was my biggest supporter, I mean, he really supported this school.”

Lucious quickly got support to become an official private school by the state as well, which happened a few years ago.

“Because I was the doing the homeschooling, I had it set up like a school here already,” she said. “At first I talked to Dr. Bell about becoming a charter school, but with charter schools you have to get on a list and the board has to say it’s OK for you to function. I didn’t want that, so I wanted it private.

“After that I just called the state to find out what I had to do, they told me to call the Health and Fire Departments to inspecting everything. Once that happened it was just like that and then here I was, New Life Uplifted School, that was four or five years ago now.”

Thanks to that faith, New Life’s student body has reached the largest it’s ever been. While their numbers keep rising, Lucious noted that their mission of providing focused one-on-one learning won’t be in jeopardy.

“Since we started, we’ve kept growing; we had six children the first two years, then the third year we had eight, then 12, to 15, and it keep adding up to 20 last year. And this year we have 41. Once the word got out, the parents just kept bringing them to us. That said, we will only have 50 children, we’ll never go over 50 because we want to ensure that they always get that one on one. We want them get to get more personal support and teaching than they would receive in public school.”

With that in mind, being an at-risk students is the key requirement to be considered for attending New Life, but what exactly does that look like?

“While I can have up to 50, I don’t take every child — you have to be at risk,” she said. “That means your grades have to be typically bad, you behavior issues, you end up getting put out of school or suspended or you have an IEP, those are the only children. And this is my thing, once I see them progressing, I have some that’s go out of here and back to public school. Once that happens I’ll bring in other children so it’s a revolving system so we help the public school as well. For times when the public school can’t help them were a source, so we’re not just a private school.”

New Life Uplifted School is located on 708 Sampson St. in Clinton. For more information, visit newlifeupliftedschool.org.