One of the largest suppliers of materials for private schools and home-school students across the United States is affiliated with a small Christian college in the Florida Panhandle.
Abeka, formerly known as A Beka Book, is named for Beka Horton, who along with her husband, Arlin, founded a small Christian school in 1954 and Pensacola Christian College in 1974.
The textbook and distance learning company grew from the couple’s desire to provide their own materials to their students and other schools eventually began asking to buy them, according to the Abeka web site.
Today, Abeka Academy Inc. takes in $45.6 million in revenue — $6 million less than its reported expenses of $51 million — according to the nonprofit’s tax documents for the financial year that ended May 2017.
Abeka, along with the Bob Jones University-affiliated BJU Press and Accelerated Christian Education Inc., is among the most popular curricula used by Christian schools that take part in Florida’s $1 billion voucher program, which pays for children from low-income families or those with special needs to attend private schools.
Though the Hortons retired from the college in 2012, Abeka carries on the couple’s legacy of what it calls a “Biblical perspective.”
For example, the company describes its teachings in the subject of history this way: “We present government as ordained by God for the maintenance of law and order, not as a cure-all for humanity’s problems. We present free-enterprise economics without apology and point out the dangers of Communism, socialism, and liberalism to the well-being of people across the globe. In short, Abeka offers a traditional, conservative approach to the study of what man has done with the time God has given him.”
Officials at Abeka, who declined to be interviewed, would not say how many textbooks the company sells or give an exact count of schools that use the materials, but said in a statement that “it is safe to say that millions of students” have used the materials.
A look at the company’s tax forms shows Abeka has grown along with state voucher programs, which have surged in popularity over the last two decades.
Revenue at Abeka jumped about 8 percent in the past decade and nearly doubled since 2000, when Florida’s first voucher programs started to take hold. It’s not clear how much of the company’s growth is attributed to vouchers. Homeschool programs, which the company also provides, also soared in popularity during that time. The K-12 school in Pensacola started by the Hortons does not accept vouchers.
“Abeka does not advocate or encourage the use of state or federal funding for private Christian schools,” Brent Phillips, assistant to the president for business affairs administration, told the Sentinel in an e-mail.
Officials at Accelerated Christian Education and BJU Press declined multiple interview requests. Unlike Abeka, those companies do not file documents specific to their curriculum sales.
Another husband and wife team, Donald and Esther Howard, started ACE in Garland, Texas, in 1970. Their approach was to break up traditional textbooks into smaller workbooks that require little-to-no teacher instruction. The company, now based in Tennessee, says 6,000 schools across the globe use the materials.
A section of the ACE web site is devoted to instructions, broken into seven steps, for how to start a school. Included in the tutorial are blueprints for how to build the recommended furniture — partitioned desks for students to work on the workbooks, which are known as PACES. The training for ACE school administrators takes just five days, according to the site.
BJU Press is likely the best known of the three curriculum companies because of its connection to Bob Jones University, which has been criticized for anti-Catholic teachings as well as for banning interracial dating until 2000.
Based in Greenville, S.C., along with the university, BJU Press published its first textbook in 1974 and now employs more than 400 people and calls itself the second-largest producer of Christian textbooks, according to its web site.
In 2008, the university apologized for its racist past, saying, “For almost two centuries American Christianity, including BJU in its early stages, was characterized by the segregationist ethos of American culture … We conformed to the culture rather than providing a clear Christian counterpoint to it.”
bkassab@orlandosentinel.com or @bethkassab
