B.C.'s foot in the door at Bountiful:
 Funding education in the community gives authorities a reason to scrutinize schools
 
By Daphne Bramham
Vancouver Sun
 
Public schools are closing, yet B.C. taxpayers will spend $867,000 this year on two independent schools in the polygamous community of Bountiful with a population of about 1,000.

It does provide the government with a reason to go into the closed community, but it needs to be doing much more than taking a glimpse every couple of years. The education ministry is supposed to be ensuring that the children there get at least as good an education as anywhere else in the province.

And that's not happening.

Jane Blackmore and all of her seven children attended Bountiful Elementary-Secondary School, just outside Creston. Her youngest went there until just two years ago. That's when Blackmore took her daughter, left Bountiful, left the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and divorced her husband Winston Blackmore, the former bishop.

Blackmore wants the government to continue funding the schools.

"I'm really afraid if the schools didn't get grants, they would take all the kids out of school and home-school them and the children would be much worse off," she says. "At least this way, the teachers have training and there are some good teachers."

But she goes on to say, "The high school was ineffective and ineffectual as far as educating children. It's not that [principal] Merrill Palmer wasn't capable, he just wasn't there teaching his classes and nor were many of the other teachers. Richard [Blackmore, who is now principal of Mormon Hills] was off driving trucks for Winston [the superintendent of Mormon Hills] when they needed truck drivers."

With the teachers away, Jane Blackmore says, boys drop out and go to work for her ex-husband or another FLDS company. By mid-October most years, only four or five boys remain, and almost none graduate.

As for the girls, she says, "Few went past the age of 15 because by then they were married."

Blackmore did her Grade 12 equivalent after she'd had her children and, eventually, she completed midwifery training. Her sons and daughters were among those who left school before graduating.

It makes her angry that the Bountiful children don't have equal access to education. Without a good education, she says they have no choices and are trapped in a polygamous life in a closed community.

She wa ts standard achievement exams required in every grade, sex education as part of the required curriculum and students provided with information about drugs and alcohol.

But, most importantly, Blackmore wants the government to require that at least some of the teachers are not FLDS.

No outsiders have taught there in the last decade -- only FLDS members, some with teaching certification and some with letters of permission to teach from the inspector of independent schools.

Jim Beeke, the inspector, signed those letters because he says that even though both schools did "sufficient advertising," they were unable to find certified teachers. Beeke couldn't say where the ads ran, but noted it's not unusual for independent schools to have difficulty finding qualified teachers.

Audrey Vance, a former Creston school trustee, doesn't recall seeing any recent ads for teachers in the Creston newspaper. But she knows there are unemployed teachers in town. They were laid off when the public school closed because of a lack of students.

As Beeke describes it, the external evaluators sent into the two schools in early November are more like auditors than investigators. They talk to the school officials, look at the books and records, talk to school officials, teachers and maybe some of the older children.

Yet Beeke and Education Minister Tom Christensen place a lot of faith in the evaluations done over three days by three evaluators who had no previous connection with the polygamous community and no specific knowledge of the fundamentalist Mormon religion. (One of the inspectors works for a B.C.-certified school in China.)

Both are convinced that because the inspectors arrived without an appointment, the administrators, staff and students were taken by surprise and didn't have time to hide anything.

But the ministry had said since last spring that Mormon Hills -- the newest of the two schools -- would be inspected in the fall. So by the time Nov. 1 arrived, how much of a surprise was it when the inspectors finally showed up?

Because three outsiders in three days didn't see lesson plans or textbooks promoting polygamy and racial superiority, Beeke and the minister have concluded that it's not happening. It doesn't seem to matter that the schools' principals, superintendents and teachers of both schools are all polygamists.

Christensen says the review of the latest inspection of the Bountiful schools was the most thorough ever conducted of an independent school.

If that is so, it makes you wonder what's happening at the province's 300 other independent schools.

And if this is the best that can be done under the current legislation, with millions of dollars flowing to all of those other schools as well, it's time the government took a hard look at its Independent Schools Act.

It appears that what Christensen calls "a balance between independence and accountability" is badly out of kilter.
 
Vancouver Sun
Originally published Friday, December 17, 2004
 
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