Polygamists' move imperils school funds
 
By Mark Shaffer
The Arizona Republic
 
Flagstaff - Polygamist church leaders in Colorado City have ordered their nearly 8,000 followers to cut all ties with the town's public schools and to teach their children at home, leaving the Arizona-Utah border community's school year in doubt.

Deloy Bateman, a high school science teacher, said Thursday that a majority of his fellow teachers already have resigned following the pronouncement by Warren Jeffs, head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. School is scheduled to begin Aug. 22.

About 1,000 students attend public school in Colorado City, and an additional 300 attend another public school in neighboring Hildale, Utah.

The move, announced late last month, was the latest by church leaders to further isolate the remote, secretive community, where some men have up to 15 wives. At various times in recent years, church members have been ordered to rid themselves of televisions and other possessions and prepare for the end times.

"I'm still deciding whether to continue teaching," said Bateman, who left the church three years ago and has taught at the high school for 17 years. "Even if the school stays open, the religious leadership will likely turn up the psychological pressure on all others to leave town."

Meanwhile, Mohave County officials in Kingman are trying to sort out the implications of having a town where the majority of students are schooled at home.

County Superintendent Mike File said he was told by school officials in Colorado City that at least 500 students will not be enrolling for the upcoming semester and that the elementary and middle schools will be consolidated.

File said the school district would lose about $3 million in funding if 500 students left. That, plus the difficulty in attracting teachers to the polygamist community, would threaten the viability of the remaining schools.

"We've got to provide public schooling if there is one child or 1,000," File said. "This is a tough thing to accept because it's one thing if it's the people's choice but quite another if they are being told to do it (for religious acceptance)."

But Colorado City Mayor Dan Barlow said the public schools will continue and that he doesn't anticipate problems in hiring competent teachers.

"This certainly isn't a rash or unsought move," Barlow said. "This school system has been losing students every year to home schools because of the confidence which has been lost in the public school system."

Barlow said that six private schools have begun operation in the Colorado City area during the past two years.

But File said that he knew of only one private school of 30 students in the area and that it's located in a nearby breakaway community of polygamists who are bitter rivals of the sect headed by Jeffs.

Bateman, the science teacher, said the private schools Barlow referred to are basically home schools with church ties and a curriculum decided by Jeffs.

"They will home-school them at least through grade school. But the high school kids will just be out on their own," Bateman said. "Half of them didn't even finish when they went to the school."

Bateman also said the church's decision to forgo public education was just the latest chapter in the antipathy between the polygamist sects.

"There were a lot of problems between the kids from the rival church camps during the last school year," he said. "It wasn't like inner-city gang problems with violence, but it was enough to make the group in Colorado City go its own way."

Ben Bistline, a longtime Colorado City resident and former member of the church, said he was puzzled why Jeffs would abandon a public school system that already was under his followers' control.

"They've been talking around here for two years about this date or that date being the time when the true believers would be swept up into heaven," Bistline said. "I guess they figure now that they have to get rid of all the apostates before they can cleanse themselves to go to heaven."

Colorado City, formerly known as Short Creek, was settled by polygamists who broke away from the Mormon Church after the church banned the practice of multiple marriages when Utah became a state. Polygamy is against the law in both Arizona and Utah.
 
azcentral.com
Originally published August 4, 2000
 
Back