Founder's Statement

When my wife Lori, currently teaching high school English and French and I moved our young family from a small panhandle farming community to Katy in 1980 we were assaulted by the pace of life in a metropolitan suburb. It seemed church, and personal relationships, had been shoved down the ladder of importance.

Time demands indicative of life in the suburbs, things such as driving distances and traffic, were changing the way our children were socialized. In smaller communities, aunts and uncles, some biological and some not, were part of our extended loving and nurturing family units. A child was surrounded daily by people of all ages who were in relationship with the child's parents. Loving, teaching, and disciplining were part of community life. The church was the center of that community. Teachers, ministers, and law enforcement officers were known and respected; now we found ourselves in a different world.

There were other more subtle factors that became apparent; pluralism in our society had relegated the commandments, God's directives to order society, to a place of antiquity and viewed as intolerant in an enlightened society. Absolutes were depicted as tools of intolerance. For two decades the commandments had been excluded from our school classrooms, and the consequences were evident in the lives of a generation.

It became increasingly clear that there was a need for a moral compass. The three R's of our grandfathers and fathers, "Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic," were not sufficient to protect, guide, and equip our children. We needed a return to the three R's of equal or greater importance.Reverence, Respect, and Responsibility: a reverence for God, respect for authority, and responsibility for one's personal actions.

We needed "a door of hope:" a place where love was the guiding theme; a place where the excellence of God's purpose for the lives of our children would not be compromised by pluralistic societal revolution; a place where tolerance means loving guidance and not carte blanche acceptance of any and all perverse behavior. To that end Faith West was established in 1982.

Hello, my name is Gary Kerr. I am one of the founders of Faith West. My family is no longer young; my son, who began the first grade in the beginning year of Faith West, has completed his post-graduate studies, married, and chosen a profession; my daughter, who was just a baby, graduated from Texas A&M University, married, has one child and another on the way and is teaching at Faith West Academy. Faith West has grown from just a handful of students to over 600. The small, mostly volunteer, staff has grown to a full and part-time staff of over 100. While many things have changed, the need for a "a door of hope" has not! The need has grown exponentially as our population increases and society struggles for identity.