Are You Keeping Up?

Lately, it seems like all of my effort is going into just keeping up, and quite honestly it can be exhausting! I am relieved to know that this is just a season, and that we are working toward a big goal for God’s glory – and I am constantly encouraged by the wonderful support and encouragement we receive from you – our amazing tribe of fellow homeschoolers, prayer partners, Facebook commenters, subscribers, donors and Backstage Pass members, video viewers, podcast listeners, and patient waiters for the film (keep reading to find out what’s going on with production).

If you have ever felt like you just can’t keep up, here’s a great piece of encouragement from Katie Glennon, at Katie’s Homeschool Cottage – Keeping up with the Joneses, Homeschool Style.

We really believe that God is doing great things through Schoolhouse Rocked, and we really believe in this whole homeschooling thing. We see God using homeschooling to build up families and to prepare the next generation of leaders to reclaim culture for TRUTH. We are totally committed to what we know God has called us to – to making this big ‘ole crazy homeschooling documentary and to creating and gathering resources to encourage and equip families to homeschool with excellence, to the end, and not lose their minds doing it, all for His glory!

So what’s up with the film?

It seems like every newsletter I send, I get emails from people wondering where the film is, with really good cause. I have been too slow in sending actual production updates! Here’s the (really short) story. Much has been done, but there is still much to do. We have finished filming all of the primary content for the film, and we have been blessed with a ton of great interviews! Next comes editing all this great content into a film – a single cohesive, engaging, beautiful story of what makes homeschooling great and why we, and around 2.3 million other families in the U.S. do it.

In the mean time, we have also worked to give these homeschooling families the tools and encouragement they need to keep going, and to give new families the gentle push they need to get started. We have been blessed with a team of great homeschool bloggers, who are writing excellent, super-practical, uber-encourgaging, another-great-adjective-inspiring, and shortish articles (the perfect length for the busy homeschool mom – unlike my super-wordy newsletters). We have put literally hours of great homeschooling videos on the Schoolhouse Rocked Backstage Pass site and we just launched the weekly, 30-minute Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast (again, just the right length, according to an expert panel of busy homeschool moms).

Upon filming our last interview in May-ish, we shifted gears to fundraising and post-production (with a heavy emphasis on fundraising). You see, to finish the film and get it in theaters we still need to raise a pretty big chunk of change. You can see the budget here. Production on Schoolhouse Rocked has been funded through a few different sources – corporate sponsors, donors, premium content memberships – and coming soon, a gigantic crowdfunding campaign. We hope to launch the crowdfunding campaign September 10th, and will be trying to raise all of the money we need to finish post-production (editing, sound, music, etc.). This is going to to require the help of a big part of the homeschooling community.

To that end, we have been gathering a group of awesome marketing partners to help get the word out. God has blessed us with an amazing group of like-minded companies, bloggers, podcasters, authors, speakers, and homeschool boosters to help us reach the big goal of funding the rest of the production through this campaign. Check out a few of our marketing partners here, and head over to their websites to say thanks. They really are awesome!