The president of Tyler County's school board has taken her kids out of the school system and begun homeschooling them, saying she wants them to have a more "Christian-based curriculum" on topics like evolution, and that she opposes the direction of state and national education.
But Bonnie Henthorn, whose current term expires two school years from now, told the Gazette-Mail she's not resigning and still accepting the $160-per-meeting payment for board members overseeing the public school system. Henthorn said she wasn't elected because she has kids, but because she speaks her mind.
"I also represent the multitude of people who are not connected with the school system who are concerned where their tax money goes," she said.
She said she hasn't decided whether she'll run again. Two fellow members of her five-member board have expressed a great deal of sympathy with her decision, though no board members said whether they'd support her again as president when they again must choose officers in July.
According to an article in the Tyler Star News, board member Scott Strode said in a board meeting last week that if he lived in a place where he could, and if he had the resources, he would "more than likely" send his own kids to a private or Christian school.
When contacted by the Gazette-Mail Thursday, after the Tyler paper reported his comments, he didn't deny that quote but said it was "kind of taken out of context." He said he believes Tyler schools do produce excellent graduates and that he doesn't like Henthorn's decision, and said he was trying to say at the meeting that Tyler is a rural area where public schools are largely the only option.
"You have to pick what you think is best for your kids," Strode said.
P.J. Wells told the Gazette-Mail that he doesn't have a problem with Henthorn's decision, saying both he and Henthorn are opposed to what they see as state and federal intrusion in local schools.
He noted his family was considering homeschooling for their then-4-year-old son before he ran for the board four years ago, hoping to make a change. Wells said they'd have to travel 45 miles to reach a private school, but if he could find a way to get his son a better education than Tyler schools, "we might look into it."
"This is the best that the state will let us have, let's put it that way," Wells said of Tyler's school system, "because the state mandates what we can teach them."
He said that because schools teach evolution, they should be able to teach that God created animals exactly as they are.
"You're allowed to teach about anything that happens with the Muslims," he said of public schools. "They want us to believe that we evolved from apes, which we didn't."
Board members Jimmy Wyatt and Linda L. Hoover both disagree with Henthorn's decision.
Science has long established that natural selection creates new species of animals over time, and public schools are banned by the U.S. Constitution from advocating religion in certain ways.
"Local boards don't really have any power to make educational changes," Henthorn said of her choice, saying her issues are over things Tyler County has no control over.
Henthorn, who took her children out of school over Christmas break, said she wants to homeschool her children, one in middle and one in high school, until she can get their scores up enough to enter a private, online Christian school based in Wisconsin.
She said she sees progress in some areas across the state, but said those changes won't come fast enough for her kids. She said she worries national standards on social studies could come to the state considering the state Board of Education's past approvals of national standards blueprints like the Next Generation Science Standards and the Common Core math and English language arts standards - which, she noted, the state school board's newly adopted standards don't differ too much from.
Though she doesn't know if it's happened in West Virginia, she said other states have seen an anti-Christian bias in schools, despite those same schools teaching kids about the Five Pillars of Islam and Buddhism.
She said her kids have been taught evolution for years in public schools, and she'd like them to be taught the "opposite science, because there is science on the other side." She said with all the hours students spend weekly in schools, two hours on Sunday isn't enough to be taught a Christian worldview.
"Hearing a sermon, no one is going to get down in the weeds with you, to talk about the gene pools, and to talk about cells, and to talk about the science behind it," she said.
Reach Ryan Quinn at 304-348-1254, ryan.quinn@wvgazettemail.com, facebook.com/ryanedwinquinn or follow @RyanEQuinn on Twitter.