Bonnie Bechard: Bible school books

Your articles on strained school budgets and Jonah Perrin’s Aug. 16 Point of View on the impact of HB2 on students are part of another story: how 3/4 of the funding for vouchers goes to fundamentalist Christian Bible schools. Money is diverted from 21st century public school education to support teaching rooted in the Middle Ages.

With the increase of $10 million per year, over $825 million in vouchers will be going to private schools over the next decade, most of which teach that evolution is a fraud, global warming is not occurring, LGBT behaviors are “abominations” and women are subservient to men.

As a part of a project , I have reviewed the curriculum of the 101 schools that received 3/4 of the funding and found that 77 percent of the money went to Bible schools whose science textbook devotes an entire chapter to teaching that the earth was created in six days; evolution is a concept that attempts to free man from God and his responsibility to his creator; the fossil record and the geologic time chart are “imaginary evidence”; and carbon dating is “assumptions of the person doing the dating.”

It is ironic that General Administration of the University of North Carolina is complicit since it administers the voucher program.

This story was originally published August 16, 2016 at 5:18 PM with the headline "Bonnie Bechard: Bible school books."