Bountiful education report full of errors

Vancouver Sun - August 4, 2007

School inspectors say everything is just fine with polygamist sect's system. It isn't. Victoria should take a closer look.

by Daphne Bramham

British Columbia's independent school inspectors believe everything is just fine at the Bountiful elementary-secondary school. The most recent report says that the school complies in every way with the province's Independent School Act and its regulations.

If that's true, alarm bells should be ringing in Education Minister Shirley Bond's office. And since the school gets close to $600,000 a year in operating grants, B.C. taxpayers should also pay attention.

To start with, the inspectors' report of their two-day visit to the school in the East Kootenay in February got some basic details wrong.


"A locally approved program of religious instruction reflecting the Mormon faith is an integral part of this school's curriculum," it says, noting that the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is based in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Neither of those things is true. The 158 children attending BESS are not being taught the mainstream Mormon faith. Their parents are members of a polygamist sect called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has its headquarters in Colorado City, Ariz.

The FLDS is not affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is based in Salt Lake City. In fact, the LDS -- the mainstream church -- renounced polygamy in 1890 and has long denounced the fundamentalists. Last November, the mainstream church went so far as to issue a plea to journalists to stop calling the FLDS "fundamentalist Mormons."

"Polygamists and polygamist organizations that occasionally make the news are not dissident wings of the Church or fundamentalists," it said in a press release. "They have no affiliation whatsoever with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."

Apparently the B.C.'s independent school inspectors didn't get the memo.

According to the inspectors, school days at Bountiful elementary-secondary begin with an assembly where "religious and moral values" are stressed. "Often tapes of guest speakers provide the day's homily. Students are frequently quizzed on these 'talks'."

This is not surprising. FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs issued an edict to his followers several years ago requiring them to listen almost exclusively to his taped sermons.

His edict remains in force even though Jeffs is in Utah's Purgatory Correctional Center, awaiting trial in September on two counts of rape as an accomplice related to forced marriage of a 14-year-old girl to her 19-year-old cousin in 2001. Once that trial ends, Jeffs will be transferred to Arizona where he faces other similar charges.

What the inspectors apparently are unaware of is the kind of sermons Jeffs preaches. Some are hate-filled rants denouncing blacks and homosexuals, which is why the FLDS is on the Southern Poverty Law Center list of U.S.-based hate groups (www.splcenter.org).

"The black race is the people through which the devil has always been able to bring evil unto the earth," Jeffs says in one. In another, he says, "If you marry a person who has connections with a Negro, you would become cursed."


Hundreds of other sermons taped while Jeffs was the principal of Alta Academy, an FLDS private school in Salt Lake City, focus on the superiority of men over women and the rightness of polygamy or "new and everlasting covenant of marriage."

On one tape that I have, Jeffs says, "This holy ordinance binds women to a man in such a manner that they are to be one. He is their Lord and as he is like God, he is God over them and they are to love and build him up and as a result will bring children unto the Lord."

Bountiful students get more than a single daily dose of the prophet. The inspectors report that the Alta Academy reading program is used in Grades 3 through 6. All health, personal planning and career education program are filtered through the religious precepts, according to the inspectors.


The inspectors note that the school has applied to have its "Book of Mormon program" certified as a ministry-approved part of the curriculum in Grades 1 through 12 instead of being only an elective.

BESS also offers two other electives that don't have ministry approval. One is a social studies course and the "World Geography 10" elective, which "endeavours to provide students with a much broader appreciation of the world, its people, languages, religions and cultures."

Given their prophet's view of blacks, it's hard to imagine what those courses might entail. The inspectors offer no insight.

They also are silent on what the "[school] authority-approved learning outcomes" are for physical education. They probably don't know that Jeffs banned all games and sports for children a few years ago. He banned the word fun as well. And, no, I'm not making this up.

There are other anomalies -- like one employee for every 6.5 students. The provincial average is one student for every 17 educators. Not surprisingly, the school exceeded its $566,000, government operating grant by more than $40,000.

Yet the number of students exceeds the provincial average in every BESS class. The largest class had 31 students in a split Grade 3-4.

If the inspectors were concerned that the school has only 10 teachers, but 14 other employees with no teaching qualifications, they didn't write it down.

The inspectors did note that teachers and even the principal do janitorial work and drive the school bus. With such large classes, you might expect that the inspectors would recommend teachers' time would be better spent on education-related tasks, especially since only three of those teachers have valid certificates from the College of Teachers. The rest have special permits from the B.C. Independent School Inspector.

The FLDS did a similar thing in Colorado City. There, the school had 275 students and 18 administrators, who used school money to buy an airplane before the state stepped in two years ago.

Bond should talk to her Arizona counterpart and then get her officials working on a massive rewrite of B.C.'s independent schools legislation. Because as special prosecutor Richard Peck pointed out in his report released this week, the only offence provided for in the act is operating without a licence.

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