“I would not have been surprised if they said, ‘hey we found a way we’re going to do it next semester, we’re going to pull it off.’ Or, you know, if they said, ‘we’re shutting down the entire school, this is your last day, you need to get everything out today.’”
Johnson said since March he has acted as if the school is closing and secured a one-year teaching position at Hope College in Michigan even as his three oldest children, one not yet graduated from high school, stay in the New York area.
“Most of us moved to this region to take this job, a lot of with families that required significant sacrifice,” Johnson said. “So it was just a roller coaster. I decided to step out of the roller coaster early on … but a lot of people did not do that. And so every time another message came from the board saying we’re in discussions but we’re going to keep talking — that was really, really emotionally painful for them. Because their whole family was invested.”
The other Protestant schools with roots in New York City were Concordia, which was affiliated with the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod and closed in 2021, and Alliance University, once Nyack College, which recently announced it will close at the end of August. Alliance was notified in June that its accreditation would be withdrawn by the end of 2023. The 140-year-old institution primarily served Black, Hispanic and Asian students of the evangelical denomination Christian and Missionary Alliance. Its campus in Manhattan’s financial district is just a few blocks from The King’s College.
This article originally appeared here.
 in an email that the school, which has faced dire financial challenges, would not offer classes in the fall.){kind=link}