Mother of Divine Grace School MODG School

Laura Berquist graduated from Thomas Aquinas College in 1975 with a B.A. in Liberal Arts. Mrs. Berquist and her husband, TAC founder Marcus Berquist, raised six children and began homeschooling.

“For ten years, keeping in mind the classical curriculum I wanted to prepare my children to do, and the fact that I wanted them to learn how to think, to obtain the tools of learning that would help them all their lives and teach them how to make judgments, I experimented with curricula. At the end of ten years I had basically the curriculum we now offer in Mother of Divine Grace School. That curriculum has been refined over the years, as we have worked with hundreds of other students.”

Mrs. Berquist founded Mother of Divine Grace School in 1995 with the goal of providing parents with the information, resources, and support necessary to educate their children at home in the Catholic, classical tradition. The school has grown significantly over the decades, now serving over 6300 students, but the goals remain the same as when Mrs. Berquist founded it nearly 30 years ago - to lead our graduates to success, to support our parents, and to build strong families. We want to help families raise their children in a living Catholic culture.

Mrs. Berquist thinks while this has always been important, in this day, and in our culture it is more important than ever. “Many people have lost sight of what the family is and does, which is prepare each other for heaven. Society doesn’t understand nature, the nature of marriage, the nature of man, or the nature of virtue. If we want to form our children in these ways, and we do, so together we can all be ‘fellow citizens of the saints’ we have to do it ourselves, in conjunction with the Church.” Helping families in that life work is the goal of MODG.

In addition to her work with MODG School, Mrs. Berquist also wrote Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum in 1998 as a guide for other parents interested in implementing a liberal arts curriculum intended to feed the soul as well as the intellect. This was followed by The Harp and Laurel Wreath in 1999, a collection of poetry meant to foster in children a love of the true and beautiful.

Mrs. Berquist has been well-known in the homeschooling community since the 1990s, and has spoken at many homeschooling conferences across the country. She has appeared on EWTN, various Catholic podcasts, and currently hosts MODG’s free webinar series “Light of the Faith: Catholic Formation for Classical Educators”.

“I have one last thing to say. I taught my children at home for about twenty-five years. I loved that time with my children, and thank God for the opportunity. I think you will love it, too.”

Mr. Lazenby joined Mother of Divine Grace as the President in January of 2020. He and his wife Kimberly are both graduates of Thomas Aquinas College where they met and were married in 2011. In his career before joining MODG, Mr. Lazenby was an Operations Manager for both DHL and Google and assisted in the launch of several startups around the country. In 2016 he returned to Thomas Aquinas College as the Director of the Annual Fund and served there for four years. For two years Mr. Lazenby was also a member of the Ventura County Search and Rescue Team and became a swift water rescue technician in 2018. In addition to his duties as the President, Mr. Lazenby now serves on a number of other non-profit boards and volunteers as a consultant for several others. Mr. and Mrs. Lazenby are now the proud homeschooling parents of their two children.