Instructors
Laura Estes
Laura Estes is a life-long resident of the Manhattan-Wamego area. After graduating from Wamego High School, she attended Kansas State University, earning a degree in Elementary Education with an emphasis in special education. She taught 6th grade at Flint Hills Christian School prior to being a stay-athome mom. Laura has been married to her husband, Ray, for 23 years. They have four children: Rachel, 20, Jonathan, 17, Abigail, 14, and Matthew, 10. They also have a black lab, Max, and 6 chickens. 2023-2024 is the Estes family’s 10th year of homeschooling. Laura loves baking bread and decorating sugar cookies, reading, antique hunting with coffee in hand, Mexican food, photographing her kids’ sporting events, feeding a crowd, and leading ladies Bible study.
Alan Gerling
Alan Gerling is an associate pastor at Grace Baptist Church. Alan earned his Masters of Theological Studies from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2020. He moved to Manhattan to minister at Grace in 2008. Prior to that, Alan taught various music classes and ensembles for five years first at the Mediapolis school district in Mediapolis, Iowa and then the Clark County R-1 school district in Kahoka, Missouri. During those years, Alan held a K-12 teaching license in Iowa and then Missouri. Alan and his wife Jodie have three children they homeschool.
Gabrielle Wingert
Gabrielle Wingert took French from the time she was four until her junior year, and then worked as a teacher's aid and found she loved teaching!! One mom asked Gabrielle to privately tutor her daughter and she has been teaching French ever since. She decided to write her own curriculum and has been honing it and tweaking it for all ages and people in her classes. In college, she became involved in the homeschool community in Manhattan and in addition to French, started homeschooling help for parents. In 2020, some public school families reached out to her and asked her to homeschool their kids full-time and she has done that for three years along with private online or in-person classes for students aged two to forty-five. In 2022, she taught French at a private Christian school in Lenexa and decided middle schoolers are the most fun to teach. Besides teaching, Gabrielle loves holding all her friends' babies, doing evangelism work at the abortion mills in Overland Park or Wichita, cooking, re-reading the same 4 book series, having movie marathons and feasts, swing dancing, Sonic, shark movies, and is terrified of spiders. She is very excited about a new co-op with people who love the Lord and His Word before all else and is thankful she can homeschool students until the Lord gives her children of her own!