Northwest Christian Homeschool Program: Aubrey Jones seeks flexibility in her career

Faith, family and dance are a few things that propelled senior Aubrey Jones to success in her final year of schooling at the Northwest Christian Homeschool Program.

Jones started being homeschooled after attending public kindergarten. So almost all of her education has been based at home, primarily within the auspices of Northwest Christian.

“I have two brothers and a sister and we all joined the (Northwest Christian Homeschool) program the same year,” Jones said.

She appreciates her mother for making the decision to use collective homeschooling. After years of watching her mother keep her and her siblings on track – especially in the early stages of their schooling – she realized the effort it takes to simultaneously raise and educate four children.

“I respect my mom more and more for that every day,” Jones said.

Courtney Manuel, Jones’ NWC Senior Leadership teacher, said Jones has always been passionate in her classes.

“She works so hard and is really humble in her willingness to help others,” Manuel said. “When she asks a question she is willing to learn from it and apply it to her life.”

Having had Jones as a student for the past five years, Manuel said she is going to miss many of the contributions that she has made to the classroom environment.

“At NWC we do a lot of our studies around Christian faith and she’s really willing to wrestle through those things, willing to make her faith her own,” Manuel said.

Aside from being a faithful and educated member in the classroom, Jones is an avid dancer at the Academy of Dance in Spokane Valley.

Jones has attended this classical ballet studio since she was 8, gaining experience not only in this traditional form of dance, but also in jazz, contemporary, improv and character dancing.

“Dance has been a fabulous social circle for me. We’re all athletes and have had to connect on so many different levels,” Jones said.

Though she feels much more comfortable in her ballet slippers now, dance didn’t always come easy for Jones.

“I remember not really liking it at first because I was so hard on myself when I was younger,” Jones said. “Going into it I was very coordinated, but I was so not flexible and that was really difficult to me.”

However, she decided to stick with this new challenge.

“I have since really grown to love the process of learning something that is so difficult,” she said. “The concept of dance is taking something that your body is inherently not supposed to do and make it look easy.

“You have to learn to perform for yourself just as much as you’re performing for someone else,” Jones continued.

Following graduation, Jones plans to attend Whitworth University to study athletic training, a degree that stems from her love of dance and desire to cater special physical training for dancers.

“I’ve been to physical therapists, but they’ve struggled to understand the complexity of dance movement,” she said. “I could use my athletic training, sports medicine and human body science knowledge to help dancers navigate the specific movement type they’re used to.”