You may see a lot of estimates floating around about how many classroom hours these Lifewise programs are costing students.
And to be clear, the impact is enormous.
LifeWise’s own public-facing numbers say they serve 64,168 students in 983 schools across 33 states.
Even if you use a very basic low estimate of 1 hour per week over a 36-week school year, that comes out to:
64,168 × 36 = 2,310,048 student-hours
🚨That is over 2.3 million student-hours nationwide. On the low end… 🤯
And if we are talking specifically about lost classroom time, the formula is simple:
students pulled during school × hours missed per week × weeks the program runs
The problem is that nobody outside these programs really knows the full number. 🤫
There is no meaningful transparency.
No consistent oversight.
No clear public accounting of how many students are being pulled during instructional time, if it’s during specials or recess, or core instruction (yes, some states allow this) how often, for how long, or what the disruption looks like across districts, grades, and schedules.
So yes, you may see estimates floating around. Some may be too high. Some may be too low. But that uncertainty exists for a reason: these programs are operating with a shocking lack of transparency and accountability.
And that matters, because the real impact is not just a number on paper. It is missed instructional time, disrupted classrooms, students shuffled into alternate spaces, and schools being forced to absorb the burden.
This does not happen for free. Even when the religious instruction is called “private,” public schools and taxpayer-funded systems are still left to absorb the scheduling, staffing, supervision, attendance tracking, and disruption to instruction.
In practice, those same public systems are often used to coordinate and funnel students out of instructional time and into these programs.
We do not need bad math to explain why this is a problem. The scale is already serious. The lack of transparency is already alarming. And the impact on public schools is already real.
What people are saying:
- Secular Education Association: And tagging education reporters and outlets- because this deserves real scrutiny.
Facebook User Facebook User Facebook User Facebook User
- Secular Education Association: Tagging public education advocates and educators -because millions of lost instructional hours and zero transparency is not a small issue.
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- Facebook User: Inaccurate and exaggerating
- Secular Education Association: Facebook User how so? Do explain.
- Facebook User: Lifewise has no business disrupting students’ school day!
- Facebook User: 2.3 million student-hours lost. Making music, lost. A faster run, lost. The adventure of reading a new book, lost. A STEM experiment, lost. An original work of art, lost. Learning to solve an argument on the playground, lost. Social skills at lunch, lost.
This is not to say that these students never get to do these things, only that they will miss out by doing them less. And the damage is real when that time is filled with biblical literalism, guilt for angering god, fear of hell, and promotion of patriarchy.
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