The first time Leann Erickson set foot at an End-of-Year Gathering, a mom she'd never met in person walked up and introduced herself, warm and unprompted. They hit it off immediately, and Leann turned to her husband David and said the only thing that made sense: these are our people.

How It Started

In 2006, Veritas Scholars Academy opened with a deliberately small test: two sections of one Omnibus class, capped at sixteen students each. About thirty students, one teacher. At the end of that first year, families were invited to Lancaster to celebrate, and most of them came. Someone had suggested it almost offhandedly: we should invite everyone here to mark the year. So they did. That gathering became the first End-of-Year Gathering.

Nobody was building a tradition on purpose. They were just glad the first year had worked, and they wanted to say so in person.

What It Became

David and Leann Erickson came to nine straight EOYGs, watching all four of their kids move through it, from their first trip (a family field trip to see Phantom of the Opera in New York) through their last child's graduation. Along the way, they collected the things every long-time family collects: a favorite teacher who got invited to a wedding years later; a daughter who signed up for an extra summer poetry class just because she loved it that much; friendships their kids still keep up with today, years and states apart.

Ask any veteran family what the actual highlight is, and most of them will skip right past the field trips and land on the same answer: the dinner dance. A sixteen-piece swing band, three generations on the floor at once, kids in costumes their parents helped assemble. It is, by Laurie Detweiler's own account, nothing like a typical high school prom, because at EOYG, the parents are on the dance floor too.

And every so often, something bigger than a friendship comes out of it. Marlin Detweiler has said it more than once, to people who don't quite believe him at first: marriages have come out of this gathering. Kids who met online, for the first time, in person, at seventeen or eighteen—sometimes with a wedding on the other side of it, years later.

Where It Stands Now

Veritas Scholars Academy now serves more than 10,000 families across 30-plus countries. Every May, a portion of them still make the trip to Lancaster—the same city, the same tradition, a lot more people than the first thirty or so. Not every year draws the same crowd, and not every teacher can make it—usually somewhere around a fifth of the faculty do, but the shape of the week hasn't changed since that first, unplanned celebration: field trips, a graduation that means something whether or not you have a graduate that year, and a dance floor full of people who found each other first as names on a screen.