Dr. Elizabeth Youmans
Founder and President, Chrysalis International
Creator and Editor, The AMO® Program
For the past 30 years, Dr. Elizabeth Youmans has traveled throughout the world as a trainer of teachers, a conference speaker, and a consultant to Christian school founders, faculties, pastors, and home schoolers. She has helped them establish their vision and expression of Christian education by training faculties, mentoring educational leaders, and writing books and curricula centered on biblical principles. Elizabeth was called into the sphere of Christian education as a parent of a child enrolled the founding year in a Principle Approach® parent cooperative in Chesapeake, Virginia. She was so interested in the Christian history lessons her son was receiving, she asked permission to audit his third-grade class. The rest is history! When one of the teachers had major surgery that year, Elizabeth was asked to teach in her place. The vision was so successful that first year, it was renamed StoneBridge School. For fifteen years, she served as a classroom teacher, curriculum writer, and school administrator when StoneBridge was designated the national demonstration school for the Foundation for American Christian Education (FACE), home of the Principle Approach. She led a team to design and launch the unique high school vision for StoneBridge School, where she remains an emeritus board member.
Elizabeth served North American education at FACE as a national trainer of teachers, a curriculum writer, an editor of The Noah Plan®, a published K-12 Principle Approach curriculum, and as a graduate school professor at Regent University in Virginia Beach. She now has 40 years of pioneering experience in Word-centered education at the local, national, and international levels, as she continues to impart the vision for educational reform by laying teaching and learning solidly on the foundation of Christ and His Word.
Chrysalis International, a Christian educational institute located in Orlando, Florida, was founded in 2000, when the Lord propelled Elizabeth into the nations. For the next 15 years, she traveled and taught on five continents. Inspired by an international NGO in 2002 to design a principle-based curriculum for at-risk children around the world, she wrote a turn-key curriculum and training program for use in the Church that is suitable for any educational setting. Known as the AMO® Program, it is a multi-generational program with a children’s enriched curriculum and worldview courses for the adults who teach and disciple them. All are available in four languages.
Today, she instructs and disciples international educators in their calling of educational leadership in the nations. She governs and co-teaches the AMO® Program online courses of study, continues to write and edit new teacher guides for the AMO® Program, and governs the activities of the non-profit.
In addition to all the traveling Dr. Youmans has done professionally, she and her family lived in Germany and she has traveled to Antarctica on a scientific expedition. Elizabeth is the mother of four grown children and enjoys her eight grandchildren and one great grandson. She is a member of St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church in Orlando, Florida.
Educational Background:
Ed.D., Whitefield Theological Seminary and College
M.A.Ed., Regent University, Virginia Beach
A.D.A. Internship, Fort Sam Houston Medical Center, Texas
B.S., Pennsylvania State University