About Pipe UP

Core Objectives

  • To provide homeschoolers with a comprehensive program to run their own local public speaking club  
  • To promote the life-skill of public speaking to teens in the home-school community. 
  • To allow teens to learn by doing. 
  • To promote confidence and character in our youth.
  • To offer a program with limited homework to complement a home-school student’s busy schedule.

Origins

In 2009,  seeing a great need for public speaking education for busy teens in our home-school community, Sara Froelich founded the club Pipe Up for Teens. 

In the 1980’s, although a honor-roll student in high school, Sara avoided public speaking including to the point of refusing to do such assignments.  Accepting a low grade was preferable to having to stand in front of a class of kids she knew well.

Once at UBC, public speaking could no longer be avoided.  In a second year French class, she had to give a  speech and found the perfect way to hide her nerves.  She signed up to speak on the the last day of classes in December and  chose to speak about Noël in France and Québec, dressed up as Santa Claus!  Arriving to class in full costume, she was ready to go!  Then the professor, who wanted to get through a lesson before her speech, asked her to wait in the hall because her costume was “un spectacle distrayant“!  Being a distracting spectacle was the last thing on earth Sara wanted to be! Hidden behind a mass of white fluffy bangs, sideburns, eyebrows, mustache and flowing beard, she muddled through the speech, just barely.  

Sure enough, another speech was required in the second semester.  As Sara’s date to present approached,  physical body symptoms due to stress started up once again.  She went to the campus doctor’s clinic to be treated for the poorly-timed “flu”.  The doctor recognizing the symptoms of stage anxiety began to scribble on his prescription pad.  Sara’s anxiety peaked . . . what drug was he prescribing!!!

The prescription: a public speaking club.  And that changed her life.  Sara went on to be a teacher and has since stood in front of classes in Canada, Japan, and the US.

Years later, in an effort to have her own home-schooled children not suffer the same journey, she decided it was important for them to acquire early experience with public speaking.  To address the specific needs of kids, she developed a new type of program for middle school and high school students: Pipe Up for Teens.  

The tremendously popular program has been operating chapters for the past decade.

 

Class Code of Conduct

The Golden Rule

Bio

Sara Froelich was born in Vancouver, Canada. She has a degree from the University of British Columbia in French, which included two years of study at Laval University in Quebec City, Quebec. She has also lived in Scotland, London, Australia, Japan and Vietnam.  She has traveled to much of Asia including Cambodia, and through many parts of Eastern and Western Europe including Rome and Greece.

Sara married her Australian husband in 1998 in Melbourne, Australia.

The Froelich family moved to the USA in 2000, and  proudly became American citizens in 2013.

Currently, her eldest is at the University of Washington, studying Human Centered Design and Engineering. Her second child is at Bellevue College in Washington State preparing to transfer into Electrical Engineering and her youngest is homeschooling high school and very active in the Civil Air Patrol. 

Sara’s resume includes teaching ESL, French, History, Literature, and Public Speaking.

She is passionate about helping kids discover the public speaking abilities that were kindling inside of them all along.  Sara believes there is nothing more rewarding than to see an individual develop a new sense of self-confidence, and spread their wings to pursue new territory.