In 1983, Christ Covenant Church was 38 members meeting in a modular building on Alexander Road. Six years later its elders voted to open a school. Covenant Day School now serves more than a thousand students from junior kindergarten through twelfth grade on the church’s 69 acre campus in Matthews, and it describes itself, without hedging, as a ministry of the church that founded it.
That directness is the thing to understand about Covenant Day. It is a college preparatory school with small classes, competitive sports and a fine arts program, and it exists to provide what it calls a biblical worldview, academic excellence and affordability for Christian families. The school does not pretend otherwise.
It started with a church plant
The church’s own history traces its roots to 1974, when a Presbyterian body in South Carolina planted a mission in southeast Charlotte that struggled for years. In 1981 a renewed effort led by an evangelist named Bob Wilcox took the name Christ Covenant, and the church was formally organized in the Presbyterian Church in America on December 5 of that year. By 1983 it had 38 members and a modular building, and it called Harry L. Reeder III home from a pastorate in Miami to lead it.
The church grew fast, met at Charlotte Christian School while it looked for land, and bought the Matthews property that became its campus, with a 28 acre athletic complex called Warner Park and a sanctuary that seats 2,000. In 1989 the church’s session, its governing body of elders, established Covenant Day School on the same grounds, according to the church.
The school’s earliest photograph on its website shows a lower school playground from 1989. Enrollment grew from around 830 students a decade ago, according to Charlotte Magazine’s school listings, to more than a thousand today.
The people behind it
The school has had a series of heads, including Mark Davis in the years Charlotte Magazine profiled it, and its faculty are described in the school’s own language as godly professionals who work collaboratively across the curriculum. The church’s session remains the founding authority, and the school’s mission statement is written from the church’s point of view: to assist the Christian family by providing an education marked by a biblical worldview, academic excellence and affordability, so that students are equipped to be salt and light.
Affordability is a real part of the identity. Charlotte Magazine listed tuition at roughly $6,850 to $14,150 a decade ago, a fraction of what the city’s secular independent schools charged, and the school says it remains committed to keeping a Christian education within reach of families who could not otherwise pay for one.
What it does now
Covenant Day offers Spanish, Latin, French and American Sign Language, theater, choral and instrumental music, visual arts, digital storytelling and photography, and it competes as a 4A school in the Charlotte Independent Schools Athletic Association, with about seventy percent of high school students playing at least one sport. Its accreditations run through Christian Schools International, the North Carolina Association of Independent Schools and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
The projects the school highlights are practical: an aquaponics program, a monarch butterfly project and an initiative called ContainIt, in which students repurposed shipping containers into living space for the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Graduates have gone on to competitive colleges and scholarships, and the school runs open house events called Come See Covenant led by current students and parents.
The church that founded the school has grown into one of the largest Presbyterian Church in America congregations in the region, with eleven buildings on the Matthews campus including a community life center with a fellowship hall, a commercial kitchen and a chapel. Reeder, the pastor called home from Miami in the 1980s, led the church through its growth, and Briarwood Presbyterian in Birmingham served as its mother church in the early years, according to the church’s history.
Covenant Day’s growth tracked the church’s. The school moved from about 830 students to more than a thousand over a decade, added a new academic building that it now tours prospective families through, and retained the price point that separates it from the secular independent schools ten miles north. Its appeal is specific and the school states it plainly, which in a market where most private schools soften their identity is its own kind of clarity.
Why it matters
Charlotte’s independent schools split into two families: the secular college preparatory schools founded around 1970, and the church schools that grew from congregations in the decades after. Covenant Day is the clearest example of the second kind, a school that a young church voted into existence and has run as a ministry for 37 years.
For a family that wants that, there are few schools in the region that do it at this scale or this price. For a family that does not, the school’s honesty about what it is saves everyone time. Thirty eight people in a modular building built this. The playground from 1989 is still on the website.