Traditional Learning Academy DL is a community of educators committed to honoring the role of the family in the education of the child. We serve parents of all faiths, backgrounds, and walks-of-life who seek to love and teach their children with integrity and joy.

Our staff stands united by our commitment to Jesus’ teachings: our traditional Christian beliefs (as articulated in personal statements of faith in harmony with the Nicene Creed) inspire our work to strengthen and support parental leadership in the educational process.

At TLA DL, we believe that every person is blessed with unique gifts and talents, and that our role as educators, in close partnership and community with families, is to nurture and strengthen each child to discover and embrace the role they have been created to fulfill.

The mission of TLA DL is to assist parents in making wise and informed choices for their children’s education at home. Whether through traditional homeschooling or through our DL program, students from Kindergarten to Grade 12 learn successfully in the context of the family, and our role is to support parents’ choice in how to educate their children.

We achieve this by providing counseling for families who are considering home education options. Families who choose to traditionally homeschool have full access to the resources and activities we offer, such as book rental, classes, fieldtrips and online resources. In our DL program, BC-certified teachers provide professional curriculum advice, individualized student learning plans, guidance, support, and evaluation, so that students meet the provincial learning outcomes. Our motto is “family first”, and we strive to facilitate learning within a multitude of family settings and philosophies, whilst still upholding, and often exceeding, the provincial standards.

We emphasize supportive, collaborative, and professional working relationships between staff, parents, and students, and we endeavour to build an effective learning community across BC. Our Home program home teachers, for the most part, live in the communities of the K-9 students they support. We also employ a wide variety of communications technologies to ensure that relationships are built and maintained, both locally and at a distance across Grades K-12. Our TLA Online-course teachers are subject experts and experienced teachers with a passion for home education in high school.

Our DL program is divided into the following departments:

TLA Home (K-9)
Students are each assigned a home teacher to plan, oversee, facilitate and evaluate learning. The Vice-Principal: Home, oversees this program.

TLA Online (8-12)
Students take online courses (with some paper based options) written and facilitated by subject specialist teachers. The Vice-Principal: Online, oversees each student’s program and ensures that graduation requirements are met. Grade 8 and 9 students may opt for a mixture of Online and Home courses.

TLA Direct (K-12)
Students may opt to engage in a variety of real-time learning opportunities, such as live face-to-face and virtual classes.

TLA Afield (K-12)
Students have the chance to enjoy learning in situ by attending local fieldtrips. We also have several opportunities for oversees trips, such as English History, Marine Biology and humanitarian or missions trips.

TLA Innovations (K-12)
This is a K-12 program that allows students to work collaboratively on problem or project based learning. The K-9 classes are live and the 9-12 pilot program will be online, live, real time and self paced for 2013-14.

TLA Special Needs (K-12)
Our special needs program provides students with Level 1, 2, or 3 special needs with individualized programs supported in the home. A Learning Assistance program also helps support students with moderate learning challenges. The Vice-Principal: Special Needs oversees the program.

Traditional Learning Academy was founded in response to pleas from parents for their children to be educated in a setting that ensured a high quality education, provided a spiritual environment and supported the family.

Allan Garneau, the founder of TLA, resigned his post as a principal with Vancouver Public Schools with the hope of fulfilling the wishes of these parents and in 1991 Traditional Learning Academy opened its doors.

From the beginning, TLA worked with homeschooling families not only to set up the registration process, but by offering support services. TLA pioneered the notion of allocating part of the Ministry grant to help parents obtain quality resources.

Over the years, TLA has consistently served about one third of homeschooling families in BC, and is renowned for its advocacy for homeschooling provisions in the School Act.

With a strong philosophical position of recognizing the role of parents as the primary educators of their children, TLA closely monitored the onset of DL programs in the public schools. Many of the programs were set up to bring homeschoolers back into the public system and families accepted accountability in return for teacher and financial support.

Parents soon discovered to their dismay that public programs could not allow the use of religious resources. TLA urged the Ministry to allow independent schools to start DL programs thereby allowing families who wanted to educate from a position of faith to partake in the DL option. We are proud to say that we were among the first five independent schools given permission to pilot the DL program.

TLA remains committed to serving families as traditional homeschoolers and in our well established DL and online program. Our teachers and office staff are committed to supporting you and your family in every aspect of your children’s learning.

In order to sign up for TLA’s distributed learning program, you will need:

• a computer with Java and Flash installed
• internet access (preferably high-speed, or at least unlimited dial-up, although even limited dial-up access will do)
• a parental e-mail address (any students requiring access to the system will be provided with their own @schoolathome.ca e-mail addresses)
• a word-processing program that can open and save in MS Word format (the free OpenOffice.org program will do)
• a PDF viewing program (Adobe’s free Acrobat Reader is good)

A few of our product offerings, such as SuccessMaker and Auralog, require access to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web-browser. Our main TLA Online site will work with any modern web-browser.