A Teacher’s Plea to a Catholic School
This is an actual letter written by a long-time Catholic school teacher to his colleagues, as well as to the parents, priests, archbishops, and National Guard of the district, warning of the dangers of IB.
Subject: I am sending this to everyone about the IB disaster.
Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2013 03:07:56 +0000
This goes out to everyone on the staff at St. Judes. You must stop this from happening at all costs.
Start forwarding this to every parent you can, right away, and ask them to forward this. The IB program is not just wrong, it is demonic. Jeff Xxxxxxx, xxx-xxx-xxxx
You are receiving this letter because someone in your community has asked me to write it, and it has to do with the fact that you are entering into the hallucination that the IB program would be a good one to adopt at your little Catholic School. You are making a grave error, and as a faculty, parish, and community should back up and ruthlessly interrogate this step. My name is Jeff Xxxxxxx. I live in rural Collegeville, not far from St. John’s University, and while I currently teach college English in the MnSCU system, most of my life as a student and educator has been devoted to Catholic schools. I have witnessed and lived through precisely what can happen to a Catholic school that adopts both the curriculum and agenda—partly available to the public, partly covert—of the International Baccalaureate Program, and there is no doubt in my mind you are about to harm the Catholic ethos of your school. As I write you all from my peat bog on this bitterly cold January evening, I can hear the story you are telling yourselves, that you can be Catholic and IB, and though the bitterness this notion will bother me for the rest of my days, I evoke to begin our Lord and Savior, who warns us in the Gospels of the impossibility of serving two masters.
I was brutally, publically grudge-fired from St. John’s Preparatory School in 2009; many other teachers were fired or fled with me. Yes, there was a disastrous and immediate personality conflict between the new principal [name redacted] and me, but pushing back against her obsession with inflicting the IB program on the school I loved and served for 19 years was a huge factor.
Many of us in the 2008/2009 school year observed that her devotion to altering what historically was an excellent, college preparatory was fanatic, even religious; to speak against it in faculty meetings was clearly sacrilege. Quickly, as meetings to discuss this unfolded, our faculty was torn asunder, and divided, which led to a terrible revolution—as depicted in any history textbook—between liberals and conservative Roman Catholics on staff. Our questions then should be yours now:
1. Our trained, highly educated faculty should be able to tell itself what to do, and how to provide to our students a high quality education on our terms. Why should we surrender our academic freedom, and adopt any other curriculum as authoritative, especially a globalist dream of the United Nations, and strangers in Geneva Switzerland?
2. Why would we adopt a curriculum that has anything to do with the UN (the largest abortion lobby on earth) or UNESCO, two organizations that are signatories to the Earth Charter and Agenda 21?
3. How can it be responsible to spend our tuition, resources and tax dollars on something from the European Union, which is every day more anti-Christian, anti-Catholic?
4. What effect will this obsession on global thinking have on our students’ self-perception, and sense of patriotism?
5. How can the introduction of the IB program do anything but dilute further the Catholic ethos and identity of our school?
6. Why would we do something that would increase the cost per student from $14,000 annually to $18,500 (training, IB administrative costs etc.).
When I was fired, it was hoped I would go quietly, but when I didn’t, the results were catastrophic: the students staged a walk-out; a Facebook page of protest bloomed into being with hundreds of angry students and alums; endless letters, e-mails, and phone calls ensued. By the spring of 2009, ten of the conservative Catholics were fired, including a man I consider a saint, [name redacted] who now teaches at Cathedral High School. At the end of the year, another six teachers and administrators left in frustration, most notably [name redacted] who is now the president of Cathedral in St. Cloud (five former SJP teachers are there now). Over 15 teachers left the next year, and even [name redacted] was fired quietly. While the school has recovered somewhat, enrollment fell from 355 to 290.
The IB program has altered forever the school I served. My AP English class, which earned endless and free college credit for two decades, was cancelled, and replaced by IB Literature and Language; I have been teaching literature for 26 years, and recognize very few of the writers. I observe from the web site that a theology class has been replaced by IB Philosophy of Religion. The school to this minute tells the world that they are Catholic and IB, but everyone knows the weekly all school prayer service has been discontinued, and Mass is less frequent.
St. Jude’s of the Lake, named after my confirmation saint of all difficult situations: you just can’t do this.
The earth is trembling, and the signs of the times, as foretold in the Gospels, are upon us. This is no time to look to Godless Europe for answers for our Catholic schools. Everything is sliding so quickly towards the secular, and bringing the IB program to your door will only make this slope more slippery. At 53, when I look up at Minnesota Catholic schools, I see a losing battle. Though I am full time in MnSCU, I was hired by the College of St. Benedict, and have taught there the last two years as a late afternoon adjunct. CSB/SJU is sliding quickly like many Catholic institutions: it was 98% Catholic in 1980 when I was a student there, and now it has dwindled to 57% Catholic…nearly 20% of Johnnies and Bennies show up reporting as atheist. Your little Catholic school is in the same danger… all Catholic Schools are, of closing, of caving, of giving in not to the teachings of our Church, but the wide and dangerous world.
Perhaps you are thinking you should call the priest that fired me along with [name redacted] to see if this is all true. You can, but he is not an honest man…he might tell you the IB program is going just great, that I was fired for insubordination, for being overly conservative, but he will likely not tell you he announced to the SJP Board of Regents in 2009 that the school needed new leadership, that he tried and failed to get a different job at a tiny college in South Dakota, that he has participated in numerous cover-ups of sexual abuse perpetrated by the 30 odd monks of St. John’s Abbey (www.behindthepinecurtain.com).
Better to contact the president of Cathedral High School [name redacted], who leads a school that has rejected what you might embrace. We just don’t need the UN to tell us what to do, any more than we need them as observers at our polling places, changing our building and industrial codes, or killing millions of unborn and yet to be born children on this planet of misfortune.
I teach MWF, and would drive to your school any Tuesday or Thursday to say this in person. How happy I was to visit your website, and see actual uniforms… at St. Stephen’s School in Anoka, we wore the same.
In Christ, Jeff Xxxxxxx
PS: I am sending this everywhere, to your staff, faculty, parents, priests, archbishops, National Guard.