My call from God to Christian schools (Part 5)
In 2006 we spent 6 months travelling around the outback of Australia, including a risky trip across remote desert areas from 80 Mile Beach to Alice Springs, around 1600km of extremely remote tracks where a breakdown could mean disaster, especially on your own as I was, and towing a camper trailer as well! We carried fuel, water and all food supplies with us. When still only halfway, we had a rear wheel bearing start to fragment; the solid hammer-like “thump” in the rear, followed by the sound on metal rubbing on metal. Disaster! I had a better chance if I dropped the trailer off, but we were still over 800km and a few days 4WD track travel from Alice Springs (the first place we’d reach to get any repairs). The noise indicated a roller had come loose from the roller bearing on the RH rear axle. Experience told me that it wouldn’t be long before the whole bearing disintegrated, and that would mean not going any further without replacing that bearing. Even on smooth good condition roads my chances weren’t good and we were on a rough track, heavily corrugated in many places, with washouts and other obstacles needing a vehicle in good condition to get through. It would take a miracle to even get to the WA-NT border yet 260km ahead. Once we crossed that border we had a chance of getting a recovery vehicle from Alice Springs to pick us up; it would take us all day to get to that border.

And, not only did we reach the NT border, we even made it to Alice Springs, although the last stretch on sealed roads was so noisy and so slow because of that bearing screeching so loudly. I had kept on saying that if we were meant to get to Alice, then we’d get there, but I wasn’t too hopeful. I was expecting the car rear axle to seize up at any time all the way. It took 3 days for us to get to Alice and get it repaired. The garage said the bearing had disintegrated but there was no damage to the axle itself, a miracle in itself! And we had towed that camper trailer all the way as well. (I reasoned that if we had left the trailer behind, we wouldn’t have seen it again, and if we did break down, it would be handy to have it to sleep in while we waited for repairs.) Outback travelling can be risky and now I look back on it all and wonder why I did so much remote travel on my own. But it was enjoyable and the peace and quiet of the outback without anyone else around is very relaxing.

When we arrived home in Melbourne, I started to look around for a teaching job. My spare funds were running low and I needed to top them up a bit. I enquired about a principal position south of Perth, WA, but when I was told there were some Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) parents involved at the school, I had my doubts. However the principal there talked me into going there for an interview, so I went. I found out that there was a significant SDA population at the school, enough to have to be careful about mentioning topics such as hell and Saturday worship. (SDAs believe that worshipping on a day other than Saturday is enough to lose you your salvation unless you repent. Their “prophetess” Mary Eddy even taught that worshipping on Sunday was the equivalent of taking the mark of the beast!) I knew that I’d have problems there, so I withdrew my application when I got home from that interview.

By early of December I was still out of a job and wondering if I’d get one for 2007. Then I saw an advert for a principal at River City Christian College (RCCC) in Echuca. It caught my eye because it was well past its closing date. So I contacted them to tell them that their advert was still there past its end date. They said they still had no-one for the principal’s position and could I at least put in an application. I knew some people in Echuca; one was my father’s cousin, a Christian who might give me some idea of what the school was like. When I rang, he said he’d been asked to contact me to ask about the position. I went for the interview, and accepted the position when offered to me.

Once again we rented a house (while still keeping our house in Hoppers Crossing, Melbourne). Our house was next to the Campaspe River which flowed into the Murray River just downstream from us. The school was a 10-minute or less drive away; most days I would get there soon after 7am and finish around 5pm. At first the school seemed to be running well enough, but records showed that it had been losing students regularly for the past few years. It had reached over 100 students and they’d had visions of it growing further again. They allegedly set the school up with room and facilities for many more students, believing that God would bless this move of “faith”. However, the numbers went into steady decline after this “act of faith”; it seems that God did not see it the same as they did! When I arrived at the start of 2007, the numbers were down to less than half they’d had previously, and even then a few of those were not legally enrolled according to the Registered Schools Board. RCCC was a Prep-10 school, yet we appeared to have students doing Yr 11&12 studies.

The previous principal had left a message saying that the Registered Schools Board (RSB) were due to assess RCCC that year (2007) for registration. So I contacted the RSB to follow up what their plans might be. I’d had good contacts with the RSB in the past and now got someone I knew. He said that the state govt had now replaced the RSB with another body with further-reaching powers and consequences, the VRQA, and that the assessment wouldn’t be in 2007 but most likely in 2008, the changeover requiring a year to accomplish. And, he added, RCCC’s funding was under investigation because they considered we were getting more funding than we should have been getting. It seemed that we were claiming funding for Yr 11&12 students but were only registered for up to Yr 10. This was news to me, so I said I’d follow it up immediately.

And I did follow it up. I asked one of the school board why we would be under investigation regarding funding. I was told that Yes, there were students doing Yr 11&12 studies but were being listed as Yr 10 because they still had Yr 10 subjects to complete. The trick was, I was told, to keep them from completing Yr 10 until after they had completed Yr 11&12, and thus could be funded as Yr 10 students. I found it hard to believe they were doing such fiddling of the books, but Yes, they were indeed, and I told this board member so. RCCC was doing the ACE curriculum that used standardized subject booklets at each level, much like a home-schooling system might do. They could mix and match so that they might be doing yr 10 in one subject, but perhaps Yr 8 in another. The individualized method permitted each student to work at his/her own pace regardless of what the others were doing. But it still should never have been manipulated to permit the extra funding. So we did have an enrolment issue and serious funding issues as well. I took this to the school board and had the system changed so that these Yr 11&12 students were actually enrolled externally but could attend the school for their studies. It meant a reduction in govt funding though and therefore less money in the RCCC bank!

The previous principal (and possibly the one before him as well) had been given RSB recommendations back about 5 or 6 years before I arrived. These included a lack of policies for just about everything to do with the school, and some serious health and safety issues such as and asbestos assessment, exit doors opening inwards, and toilet locks that could end up locking someone in and not being able to get out (this did happen one evening!). We also didn’t have available our official certificate (effectively our licence to operate as a school) that had to be on show in the school office. It was missing; in fact no-one knew what it was or even if we’d ever had one! This school was in a proper mess and may not even had a legal right to operate as a school.

The VRQA came visiting early 2008. Almost their first words (after announcing a school review) to the staff gathered in the staffroom were “We intend removing some or all of your school registrations.” That is, we were registered primary P-6 and secondary 7-10. Most likely they meant that they would remove at least our secondary registration and probably also our primary registration. We found out later that the VRQA had a particular vendetta against Christian schools and had selected around six schools to start with to begin their planned destruction. They said they had already shut one school down before they visited us; we never did find out which school that was. We were given terms of assessment to consider including the total removal of anything in our curriculum that referred to biblical creation; creation teaching, they said, belonged in our myths and legends time, not our official curriculum; evolution was science and creation was not, so end of story!

We also needed to produce around 70-80 policies on every aspect of school activities. But their main focus (really an obsession!) was on removing all refences to God and the Bible from all our official statements and curriculum documents. On their first official assessment review later on, their report said that I was a fundamentalist teacher, something that in their context was intended to strongly suggest that I was a religious extremist of some sort, implying something maybe akin to being a terrorist. I spent long hours reviewing our curriculum documents which were in general very concise and not detailed enough because our curriculum was actually built into the ACE workbooks the students used. All the ACE curriculum had to be collated, letters written to obtain information. And we only had six policies, none of which actually dealt with RCCC. They had been copied from policies of another ACE school and mostly just had names and labels changed, but the wording remained largely applicable to the other school. They were useless! I spent long hours researching and writing policies for all sorts of areas. I ended up with 72 policies covering every possible aspect of school management including Emergency Management Plan, Bus policy, Occupational Health & Safety, etc. At first I would present what I had written to the school board for ratification, but this process was too slow so I finally put all the completed policies in a folder and presented them to the board, telling them to check them and if there were no stated issues, then consider them ratified! We were learning to cut corners due to the time constraints placed on us by the VRQA. And by the end of my second year there (2008) I was getting exhausted due to long hours being put in, including most weekends and holidays.

On their second visit the VRQA had a list of complaints, mostly due to their religious hatred of our biblical standards. They noted that on our website we declared God to be the ruler of the universe. They ordered me to remove it because it was an anti-government statement. I told them they were being ridiculous. And our statement of beliefs on our website was also under fire; they ordered me to remove that also. I told them it was none of their business what we put on our website; the website was not their official document to dictate terms about it. I don’t know what their hangup was but they certainly had a serious hatred for anything Christian. They continued to make it clear that they would shut us down if we couldn’t remove everything Christian from our school, website, everything. We were going to be completely sanitised or closed down!

At the end of 2008 I was suffering much stress-related health problems. I had a medical checkup and was found to have oesophageal ulcers. I was advised to back off my workload for a while or else things would get worse; the worst case scenario was that I could end up with cancer, or require major surgery for my stomach issues. I had been working 80 hour weeks consistently for a long time but would have to cut this back in 2009. The school board didn’t seem to understand my needs here and, effectively, without some support for my workload, it looked like I’d have to resign my position at the end of 2009. And with the VRQA still trying hard to shut us down, it didn’t look like I’d be backing off the workload enough yet.