One of a Kind: West Virginia S Only Classical and Christian School Expects a Lot From Students

By Bob Schwarz, The Charleston Gazette, W.Va.

Apr. 15–BARBOURSVILLE — Andrew Bolano expects to be the valedictorian of the largest class ever at Covenant School in Barboursville — six students.

“It’s the biggest class yet,” Bolano said. “That’s a source of many jokes among my friends who don’t go to school here.” Two years ago, just one senior graduated from the school.

Bolano could have gone to St. Joseph High School, across the street from the Catholic church he attends. His mom thought he’d get a better education at Covenant. She thought the school would challenge him.

“If I hadn’t run across Covenant, I probably would have put him in St. Joseph because they have an excellent school too,” said Linda Bolano, mother of five and the wife on an orthopedic surgeon. Three more Bolano sons attend Covenant, and a Bolano daughter will start kindergarten there in late summer.

“One thing unique here is they teach you to write well,” Andrew Bolano said. “To write you have to be able to think. It’s a whole process.”

Covenant School is a classical and Christian school, the teachers explain. The 11-year-old school belongs to the Association of Classical and Christian Schools. It’s the only such school in West Virginia.

Bolano transferred in for the last month of first grade. It was the school’s first year, and he encountered teacher Mindy Stanley, who helped small children bothered by loose teeth by looping a string around the tooth, then looping the other end around a door. “A popular teeth-removal method,” he recalled.

Bolano will be 16 when he graduates, having skipped a year along the way. All five colleges to which he applied, including Duke and Vanderbilt, have accepted him, but he’ll go to prep school for another year to mature and play soccer, his mother said. He plays club soccer now and wants to play college soccer.

Junior Clint Wilson shares several classes with Bolano. Although there are two first-grade classrooms in this school of 260 students, a shortage of students in the upper grades compels juniors and seniors to share many core classes in an alternating-year cycle.

On a recent day, Wilson, Bolano and others took part in a discussion of Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” and its lengthy opening chapter “Economy.” Thoreau declares that all things considered, “including the value of a man’s soul and of today,” he thinks he did better during a year at Walden Pond than any other farmer in Concord.

One student said Thoreau was mocking the catechism. Wilson disagreed: not mocking, but challenging.

Wilson’s mom, one of the school’s founders, teaches sixth grade. She and her husband helped start the evangelical Christ Community Church beside Huntington’s Ritter Park in the early 1980s.

Ardoth Rutherford teaches American and classical literature one year, British literature class the next. Her students read Sophocles, Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables,” and Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” and “Crime and Punishment.”

Students study Latin in grades 3 through 6, then take a class in logic in grade 8. “Our program here is different,” Rutherford said. “We don’t protect them from ideas.”

Nearly all the students come from churchgoing families, Rutherford said. A Christian approach pervades everything the school does. An unchurched person from a Christian background might feel comfortable, but Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus probably wouldn’t, she said.

“There’s a definite market for what we do,” Rutherford said. “We believe there’s a need in the education community for a school that emphasizes rigor.”

In Jeanne Terry’s third-grade class, students took turns lying on their backs making watercolor paintings. Michelangelo did that for three years when he painted those frescoes on the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, Terry explains.

Classes normally take seven or eight field trips a year, said teacher Aubrey Morris, who ran into a reporter on a day her second-graders visited the Clay Center to tour the Avampato Museum’s science galleries and watch a West Virginia Symphony young people’s concert. When the Huntington Museum of Art had an Egyptian mummy exhibit, she took her second-graders.

“We do ancient Egypt spring of second grade,” Morris said. “The majority of our field trips go along with something we’re doing in class. It’s not just fun, even though we think it’s a fun experience for the kids.”

To contact staff writer Bob Schwarz, use e-mail or call 348-1249.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Charleston Gazette, W.Va.

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