Discipleship in the Classroom:
Anya Zhakevich’s Passion for Sharpening Minds and Shepherding Hearts at Legacy Christian Academy
As a sixth-grade teacher at Legacy Christian Academy, Anya Zhakevich’s love and appreciation for middle school students increases the more time she spends with them. She loves that they are trying to figure out who they are and what they believe. They care deeply about what their peers think, but they are still willing to listen to what their authorities say. “They want to learn,” Anya said. “They want to understand the world as they navigate this season in their lives.” She sees it as a privilege and joy to walk alongside these students and their families.
Anya knows the impact a teacher can have because she remembers the impact a teacher had in her life when she was in third grade. Two years earlier, her family had moved to Los Angeles from the former Soviet Union. They’d immigrated to the States because their Christian faith was illegal throughout Russia and the eastern European countries it controlled. At the time, Anya was still learning English. That made school particularly challenging. The only person who really understood her was her twin brother, Philip. Despite the language barrier, her third-grade teacher was still able to have a life-changing impact on Anya.
“She was extremely nice, patient, and kind,” Anya said. “She didn’t overlook who I was even though we didn’t always understand each other.” Because of her teacher’s influence, young Anya decided that she wanted to follow in her teacher’s footsteps. And she never wavered in that desire.
“I guess I’m one of those people who never had to figure out what I wanted to do with my life,” Anya said. “I’ve known since third grade that I was going to be a teacher.”
Anya may have known what she wanted to do with her life from a young age, but it wasn’t until she was in middle school that she understood the ultimate purpose of education.
“I became a Christian in eighth grade,” Anya recalled. “It happened at Grace Church’s junior high winter camp. Pastor John was preaching. I realized that I was just putting on a Christian face because that’s what I had always done. But I needed to move from looking like a good Christian to actually making my faith my entire life. After that, I knew that whether I taught at a Christian school or a public school, I was going to do everything I could to live with a Christian worldview and show the love of Christ to every student.”
In God’s providence, Anya has been carrying out that exact mission for seventeen years, the last twelve as a sixth-grade teacher at Legacy Christian Academy. Because Anya was saved as a junior high student, there is a special love for this age group and sense of urgency to share the gospel with them.
Legacy has a motto—“Sharpening minds. Shepherding hearts.” Anya said, “As we strive to sharpen our students’ minds, we present them with high standards of academic achievement. Every teacher does everything he or she can to help students reach those standards of excellence.”
One way Legacy ensures the quality of its education is by introducing each student to a variety of teachers. Starting in elementary school, the students learn from experts in their fields. Even as young as kindergarten, students will have a music teacher, a computer teacher, a science teacher. And each of those teachers are given all the resources they need to teach effectively.
“On the shepherding-the-heart side, we’re always striving to teach character and virtue, not just behaviorism,” Anya said. “We teach a Christian worldview in our classes and emphasize discipleship. As the students grow and mature, we have chapel, then small groups after chapel where a dozen students meet with a teacher to discuss the message, and even a three-day retreat in middle school where students hear Christ-centered messages. We want everything we do to be intentional.”
Whether it’s sharpening minds or shepherding hearts, relationships are a big part of everything that happens at Legacy. They provide the opportunity to speak truth into students’ lives, help them make wise choices, support them when they fail, cheer for them when they succeed, and always point them to Christ. And perhaps the most important relationship at Legacy is the one between parents and teachers. While in many public schools parents have no say in their children’s education, Legacy partners with its parents.
Though a Christian worldview weaves through every aspect of Legacy’s curriculum and culture, the students attending the school do not need to come from Christian families. Since the school was founded by Tim and Donna Borruel in 1998, hundreds of families from all backgrounds have sent their children to Legacy because of the high quality of the school’s education. Through the years, this has provided countless opportunities for evangelism. Students hear biblical truth at school, see Christlike teachers, and take that home to their parents. This makes the extraordinary education at Legacy a venue for both discipleship and evangelism.
“Our enrollment policy has actually brought a lot of families to churches through their kids,” Anya said. “The kids hear biblical truth regularly, and a lot of times Legacy is the only place where they hear that because not all families attend church on Sundays.”
In 2015, Legacy Christian Academy received the United States Department of Education National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence Award. This award recognizes that Legacy is one of the nation’s highest performing schools, a place where students thrive socially and academically. It also confirms what many in the Santa Clarita Valley have known for years. Legacy is a unique place, a thoroughly Christian school that even the United States government recognizes is providing an extraordinary education.
As amazing as it is to teach at a world-class school, high standards are not the only reason Anya loves teaching at Legacy Christian Academy. Above all, she loves the intentional, Christ-centered relationships. Anya said, “There’s a unity among the staff and faculty because we are all pursuing the same goal: training our students to excel in academics while teaching them to love and follow Christ.”
In 2022, the Legacy Christian Academy board of directors asked the Grace Community Church elder board to assume spiritual and legal oversight of the school. This strengthened Legacy’s religious liberty protections and provided more opportunities to expand Legacy’s world-class education. To that end, the John MacArthur Charitable Trust is investing in Legacy, both to bring the right students to its campus and to build a curriculum from Legacy’s unique philosophy of education that can be replicated in educational settings around the world. The goal is to make disciples through education and evangelism, through the unique and effective model of Christian education that Legacy has honed over a quarter-century of ministry.
