Frank Stirk
CW BC Correspondent
bc@christianweek.org

VICTORIA, BC-Thousands of parents who home-school with financial help from a British Columbia ministry of education program have been told they cannot stay in the program if they use unauthorized curricula-including any faith-based materials-to teach their children.

Many Christians call the decision an intrusion upon their rights as parents. But a national home-schooling advocacy group says they were warned "right from day one" that this would happen.

"We predicted this," says Dallas Miller, executive director of the Home School Legal Defence Association of Canada, in Medicine Hat, Alberta. "You can’t take government money and expect to have complete freedom of curricular control.

"I think a lot of people were deceived by school boards into thinking they could have their cake and eat it too."

Called the distance-education program, the initiative allows parents to teach their children at home using online materials and the professional help of an accredited teacher supplied by their local school district.

The parents are given money for resources, while the school district gets the same amount-currently $5,408-in per-pupil funding for distance-education students as it does for regular students.

A number of school districts seized on the opportunity to generate much-needed revenues and developed their own on-line programs, which they aggressively promoted among home-school families. About 6,800 children are now in the program.

"If they’re being schooled at home, all [the district is] doing is providing online resources to them. That’s a money-maker," says North Vancouver school trustee Cindy Silver. (North Vancouver does not have a distance-education program.)

But for all this "so-called generosity," says Miller, "distance-learning is effectively an attempt to bring the public school back into the home-schooling community. It’s a poisoned chalice."

The catch-as Christian parents who joined the program now realize-is that the government sees distance education as something very different from home-schooling.

"The curriculum is delivered by the school district," Education Minister Tom Christensen told Canadian Press. "Public schools and public school districts cannot be delivering a faith-based curriculum as part of a distance-education program."

Silver says that decision flows from the government’s interpretation of Section 76 of the School Act. It states: "All schools must be conducted in a secular, non-sectarian manner and no religious dogma or creed can be taught."

"They decided that under Section 15 of the Charter, religious freedom means the freedom not to have somebody imposing their religion on you," says Silver.

But she questions whose freedoms are being infringed upon when children are being taught by their parents in the privacy of their homes.

"The only argument that could be made, I suppose, is that you still have to have a certified teacher at the other end who is being exposed to [the religious materials] in order to evaluate it."

Yet even non-religious parents who signed up for distance-education are vowing to opt out rather than be forced to use "official" resources.

"I don’t think anyone should be able to tell me what I can do in my own home and that’s what they’re telling us," Langley mother Anita Kosovic told the Vancouver Sun.

"It’s another blow to the whole idea of pluralism in public schools," says Silver. "It’s just another example of the need for the School Act to be revised."

In fact, Miller worries that the government may be laying the groundwork for a withdrawal of funding to private schools.

"I don’t see a strong argument against taking that step," he says. "I mean, if the ministry’s logic is sound and it’s applied to private schools, how can the government give grant money to private schools that teach a religious curriculum""

Miller says the only fair option for B.C. parents is a tax credit similar to what Ontario’s previous Conservative government put in place-and which the new Liberal government has since rescinded.

"That’s the only way," he says, "to effectively get some financial compensation back into people’s hands, maintaining freedom to educate and keeping the government away from controlling curriculum."