From the classroom to the dinner table

At the end of January, Alberta’s government implemented a set of policies that require schools to communicate more with parents about sexual orientation and gender identity issues. Teachers in the province now need to give parents notice before covering any human sexuality topics. Students under the age of 15 also need parental permission if they want to change their name or pronouns. For students over 15, parents will be notified of changes. Last year Saskatchewan and New Brunswick passed similar legislation, but their age threshold was set at 16.

Christian Courier sat down with Jeremy Horlings, Associate Executive Director of The Prairie Centre for Christian Education (PCCE), and Darren Spyksma, the Associate Executive Director of Society for Christian Schools of B.C. (SCSBC,) to talk about parent-teacher dynamics, trust and communication in Christian schools.

Christian Courier: Since the start of the school year, a polarizing debate about parental rights has been unfolding across Canada. Is this true for Christian schools as well?

Jeremy Horlings: Yeah, it’s an issue in Christian schools as well. Maybe even a stronger issue than in some non-faith-based schools.

Darren Spyksma: In fact, there are some Association leaders and Christian school administrators or board members who might leverage the conflict around parental rights to make themselves more attractive to a certain percentage of the population.

CC: Do some of Alberta’s new policies include things that Christian schools in B.C. and Alberta are already doing?

Spyksma: Yeah, I can’t speak for all Christian schools, but ultimately education is a parent’s responsibility. Parents choose to partner with a school and our schools are built on that tradition. Any time there’s disagreement, the goal is always to work with families, to support families. That gets complicated in some of these conversations because different families need and are expecting different things. But the goal is always to reinforce the family unit in whatever the school does.

CC: Within a Christian school context, if there’s a parent who’s concerned about what a child’s learning at school, how should they deal with that?

Spyksma: Best-case scenario, they come in and have a meaningful conversation with a teacher or, ideally, they equip their student to have that conversation. Obviously, if a child’s in kindergarten or Grade One, that’s not realistic. But by the time our kids are in Grade Four, Grade Five, Grade Six, they should have language for expressing their concerns directly to their teacher.

Horlings: I would echo that. I appreciate having conversations with parents one-on-one rather than a town hall-type situation where it’s hard to listen well.

CC: It seems like some parents are suspicious of the “hidden agenda” of teachers, and some teachers and administrators are concerned for the safety of transgender kids.

Horlings: I think that is oversimplifying the situation. There are those parents, teachers and administrators; however, there are also teachers who are suspicious of the government, and parents concerned for the safety of trans kids. So, it’s not as simple as two sides; there’s a variety of opinions. I think that most teachers are afraid to address these topics. They already feel like they have enough on their plate and might even avoid entering into good conversations out of concern for backlash.

CC: What other subjects tend to bring up parent concerns with the curriculum?

Spyksma: Harry Potter. Origins of the earth. Baptism. If a staff member got divorced, some parents would wrestle with: “Can they still be a teacher?” We’ve weathered those things. One issue that intrigues me more than conversations about sexuality and gender is AI and biogenetics. I think we may be spending too much time on one thing while losing focus on something that has the possibility of redefining “human.”

Horlings: Christian schools have always dealt with hard topics. There’s always been divisiveness. Anytime you are dealing with somebody’s most precious treasure – their child – and you combine that with their deep-seated beliefs, you are going to have conflict. You are going to have people that not only disagree, but strongly and passionately disagree. I think we need to learn how to disagree better. We love our kids, we love our faith and we love God, so it’s going to be hard. Remember, with some of these controversial topics, we don’t even agree within our own family unit. How can we expect a school to have a unified or a uniform decision?

CC: What are some of the hopeful things that you see coming out of Christian schools right now, ways that we can model reconciliation across polarized issues?

Spyksma: If Christian communities can figure out how to disagree well, and I’m not always sure that we can, that might be the most significant gift outside of life in Jesus Christ that we can give the world right now.

Horlings: Christian schools have become far more diverse. There’s more denominations present in our schools than in the past. One of the things we can do is to say to our kids, “Hey, these are tough conversations. How about you go and have a conversation with your pastor around this, have a conversation with your parents around this? Bring those perspectives to class and then let’s share those.”

CC: During the pandemic, parents couldn’t physically go into school buildings. Are we seeing lasting effects of that physical distance? Is that why it’s harder for parents and teachers to trust each other?

Spyksma: I think it’s probably one of the contributing factors. One of the highlights as a parent, for me, when my kids were working their way through grade school was the celebration of learning evening where parents could go into the school and see all the amazing work being done by students. We could revel not just in our own child’s presentation, but also in the work of other students.

Horlings: Over the last 20 years, there have been fewer parents available to volunteer in schools. Parents who come into schools and build relationships with teachers are less likely to make broad generalizations like, “This teacher has an agenda.” We’ve become less relational or less connected to some of our schools and I think that often polarizes people.

We need to ask ourselves, what does it look like to pray for teachers instead of gossiping about them? What does it look like to have tough conversations with your kids at home? I send my kids to a Christian school because they’re getting a variety of Christian perspectives [there]. If I didn’t want any other perspectives, I’d have to home-school them, and I couldn’t even let my wife teach them because she would have different perspectives on certain things! I like to assume there’s going to be a variety of perspectives coming to my kids when they’re at school. We have the opportunity to talk about those when they get home.

Spyksma: Conflict is actually part of life. Let’s not be surprised when conflict arises [and ] we don’t always get our way. We need to walk towards a common vision, even when we disagree about some books in the library or we disagree about a specific policy that the school has or does not have, or we have a teacher who says something that we don’t believe is faithful. None of those things should actually be surprises, and none of those things actually mean the school is doing a bad job. Schools aren’t churches. To be a good learning institution and prepare kids for the future, we actually need to push up against some of those controversies and develop critical thinking. What better place, other than maybe the dinner table, is there than a Christian school classroom for wrestling with hard things? If we don’t do that in the classroom, kids are going to use their phones and wrestle with those issues on Discord (an instant messaging app). That will be a different conversation altogether.