IN-DEPTH: Alberta Homeschool Program Reports Influx of Parents Unhappy With Public Schools

Enrolment at Hope Christian School doubled during COVID

A child writes in their school notebook during a home schooling session in Cremona, Alta., on March 23, 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. (The Canadian Press/Jeff McIntosh)

A small Christian school that offers a home education program for students across Alberta saw enrolment double the first year of COVID and has continued to grow, as more parents leave public schools citing concerns over curriculum content and overemphasis on gender ideology.

“We just exploded. My grade 10 class went from 50 [students] to 106, essentially doubled in September of 2020,” says Margaret Dart, vice-principal and online high school teacher at Hope Christian School in Vulcan, Alta.

Dart told The Epoch Times that enrolment spiked during COVID as more parents became aware of what their children were learning due to online classes. She said Hope School continues to attract parents pulling their children out of public schools in the face of “critical race theory,” a “woke agenda,” and complaints of gender ideology taught at the expense of academics and basics—reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography.

Margaret Dart, vice-principal and online high school teacher at Hope Christian School in Alberta says in June 2023 that homeschooling exploded during COVID and the trend has continued due to gender ideology in public schools. (Courtesy Margaret Dart)

Parents who spoke to The Epoch Times suggested that the pandemic exposed an increased focus on “gender ideology” in schools, while online classes exhibited a gap in academic learning.

In early June, for example, during Pride Month, an Ottawa school board sent an email to all staff, suggesting that teachers can call children by “they/them” pronouns at the start of the new school year, until children chose their “preferred” pronouns. The email declared that teaching LGBT identity should be embedded in the “overall learning environment” and was not “open to debate or selective participation.”

Dart said families need not fear her school will become more “woke.” She said that sort of ideology “would never fly” in rural Alberta. “Third-person pronouns don’t cut it. You might see it in Calgary and Edmonton, but not in the rest of Alberta,” she said.

Many of those registered at Hope School, which offers programs for grades 1 to 12, are from the local Mennonite community, whose children have never attended public school. Dart said her school also sees many other parents who tried the public system before deciding it conflicted with their religious beliefs or family values.

‘Embedded’

Dart said when COVID shut down schools and students moved to online learning, in many cases parents were seeing what their kids were being taught for the first time. One mother now under the Hope School umbrella, pulled both of her children out of a tiny rural school in favour of homeschooling after finding out her daughter was pressured to join a GSA club.

GSA stands for “Gay-Straight Alliances,” which the Alberta government defines as groups run in schools, by students or faculty, to promote “equity for sexual and gender minority students,” with the stated goal of helping “LGBTQ2S+ students overcome feelings of isolation and alienation that are a result of homophobic and transphobic bullying.”

Dart said the family’s daughter felt pressured to join the GSA group, and soon began self-harming and “cutting herself,” which the family attributed to the teen having difficulty reconciling subject matter in the group versus her Christian home life and beliefs.

A group of Hope Christian School students on a recent field trip. (Courtesy Margaret Dart)

Laurie, a small-town homeschooling mom who asked for her last name to be withheld to protect her children’s identity, said she also pulled her kids out of school during COVID. Her breaking point was after the new principal and vice-principal brought a new agenda and a sudden “lack of transparency” to the school, she said.

“I was asking questions about content they were presenting to the children that we weren’t comfortable with. And then the school principal basically said we were not allowed to pick our children up from their classroom.”

Laurie said parents were told to wait outside the school and forbidden from entering the building.

“The school started with indigenous days, then they took away singing ‘O Canada.’ Then they started with the rainbow flag,” says the mother of four children, aged seven to 17.

In grade eight, her son was unhappy and announced suddenly that he wanted to quit school. Laurie said she removed him from public school in favour of homeschooling. He completed grade 12 this year. “Last week, we celebrated his graduation,” said the mother.

Ideology

Jake Zwart, executive director of the Ontario Christian Home Educators’ Connection, says much of the curriculum currently being used in schools is not what many families want to be taught.

“We’ve got powerful ideologies in the world that want to indoctrinate our children, your children, my children, every child,” said Zwart, who homeschooled all four of his sons through grade 12.

“The curriculum is teaching self-idolatry, rather than teaching you’re a child of God,” Zwart told The Epoch Times. “We have to consider how these ideologies are coming into the school system.”

That was the case for Dana Willet, who lives in a small town outside of Edmonton. She said she began homeschooling her four daughters, now aged 20, 15, 14, and 6, during COVID, after her “eyes were opened” to what students were “actually being taught.”

“I realized I didn’t like what was being taught. They start drilling some stuff in these kids that’s really pointless. It just wasn’t the truth,” said the mother.

Willett said there was a music teacher in her daughter’s high school that “was continually promoting being gay. It was a confusing time for my daughter, and her group of friends. They all really loved music, but they were confused. They thought maybe they could be gay or lesbian.”

Willet’s daughter is not gay, but the mother says the undue influence and pressure affected her. She said her daughter came home describing a class where students had to pick a colour.

“The kids would have to say ‘I’m a red.’ The red would mean ‘I’m mad,’ instead of just saying ‘I’m mad.’”

“We had always taught our kids to just say how they felt. Then the school was bringing in the rainbow stuff, and kind of sneaking it in a little bit,” said Willet.

She said homeschooling was the best choice for her family. “It develops a relationship between you and your children. You also have a choice on what it is you teach them.”

Excluded

Tanis, a mother who lives a few hours outside of Edmonton, asked that her last name not be used to protect her children’s identity. She has one daughter in high school and one in junior high. She pulled one child from public school last year and it’s been so successful that this September, both girls will be homeschooled.

“The main reason was the curriculum in the public school, we were uncomfortable with what was being included in the content,” she told The Epoch Times.

She said her daughters had to be excluded continuously from objectionable content, sometimes at their own request, to the point that “it was potentially harming them.”

“They were choosing for themselves to be removed from the classroom, which doesn’t have the best social or mental health kind of response... being excluded or isolated regularly from peers,” she said.

The family objected to much of the content introduced by the school because it wasn’t “age appropriate” or clashed with the family’s worldview and religious beliefs.

“It just came to the point that we were clashing with the agenda. The school was pushing different ideologies, teaching things we felt were the responsibility of the family, not the school.”

Tanis said she expected the school to provide academics like reading, writing, and math, instead of the obsessive focus on gender ideology and critical race theory.

“It feels like public school crossed the line into areas we think have to be taught within the context of the family,” she said.

Tanis said that ideology has “infiltrated the curriculum in every aspect” in public schools as well as the broader society.

“It feels like our culture right now is tolerant of everything except for Christianity,” she said.