Caitlin Erickson, a woman who’s been speaking out against an abusive Christian school she attended in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, had her home vandalized this week. It came days after she and two other former classmates urged the provincial legislature to crack down on the school’s fundamentalist curriculum.
Erickson made headlines in August after she and several former students at Christian Centre Academy (now called Legacy Christian Academy) went public about the abuse they suffered there. Erickson, who spent over a dozen years in that school system until 2005, said she had been paddled by two male staffers. Another student was subject to a “violent exorcism” to cast out his “gay demons.” Another student who talked back to his teachers was punished with “solitary confinement” all day for two full weeks.
It wasn’t just that a fundamentalist Christian school was abusive. This was a government-funded school and had been receiving money for decades. The student-victims called on the government to at least halt all funding until an investigation could be completed.
In September, Erickson and two other victims filed a $25 million class-action lawsuit against the school and Mile Two Church (formerly the Saskatoon Christian Centre) which oversees it. They said they had been sexually abused by a former church-affiliated Sunday School teacher, Nathan Schultz, when they were between the ages of 4 and 7. At the time, he was about 17. School officials knew about the abuse, the women alleged, but took no action to stop it.
The woman who alleges she was abused in the equipment room says she told her parents of the alleged sexual abuse in 1998, when she was 10 years old.
Her mother and father tell CBC that they informed a senior church official.
They say his response to the news was, “Oh my God, not another one.”
They say the official told them that another girl’s family had left the church over similar allegations and that the church was handling it. They say he told them to keep quiet so as not to interfere with what they were doing.
All of this was extremely troubling for obvious reasons.
But Erickson wasn’t done yet.
She’s spent several weeks now trying to get a meeting with government officials, hoping to convince them to stop funding this abusive school. She even appeared in the Saskatchewan Legislature this week to make her case. It hasn’t worked. Premier Scott Moe’s office hasn’t returned her calls.
Even if the government’s argument is that the abuse allegations haven’t been substantiated and no judge has ruled in the victims’ favor, it’s not like their funding of the Christian school can be defended. After all, Erickson and others argued, they’re using the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) curriculum, a series of fundamentalists textbooks that promotes misinformation to children.
Erickson says the heavy fundamentalist religious emphasis came at the expense of basic learning such as math and spelling. One example cited includes teaching that humans and dinosaurs coexisted on earth.
“The information in these textbook are not scientifically accurate. At the end of the day, it’s about getting a better education than we got,” Erickson said.
…
The government has appointed an independent administrator to oversee the school, but students want the government to shut it down or at least suspend its more than $700,000 in annual taxpayer subsidies.
The Christian textbooks also cite the Loch Ness monster as evidence that dinosaurs didn’t go extinct after all.
Ultimately, there’s all kinds of reasons the government shouldn’t be giving any money to this place. If the abuse allegations aren’t going to do the trick, then why not the lying to kids in the name of Jesus? Take your pick. And at the center of it all has been Caitlin Erickson.
This week, the strong advocacy from Caitlin Erickson took a scary turn when she announced that her home had been vandalized with Christian graffiti on Thursday… then set on fire the next day.
She and her eight children—one biological, one nephew, and six adopted—are all safe. They left the home after the first act of Christian-themed hate. Not all their pets made it. No suspect has been identified.
There is, however, a GoFundMe page for her started by her sister. (Erickson herself verified that this is legitimate.)
… all of their belongings have been lost. They have also been displaced from their home for an indefinite amount of time. Your financial support will go directly to assisting in meeting their needs, such as food, clothes, and dog items. Thank you for any financial contribution that you can make to support this family <3
If you’d like to help out, you can do so here.
It’s appalling that someone who’s acted so courageously and continues to fight for this cause, even while government officials avoid her at every turn, has to face yet another ordeal because of what she’s doing. It doesn’t look like any of this will silence her, though, and we’re all better off because she and her colleagues aren’t going to stop until they see results. No one else should have to suffer the way they did.
(Thanks to Todd for the link)