Education

The Lower Bay School was a private institution started by an American woman named Reny Hill, a gentle soul who was dismayed by the standard of education on Bequia. When Rachel and Vanessa started attending, the school was situated in a building on Marie Kingston’s land but was eventually moved to the old bakery on the flat.  Mac was one of the school’s three trustees, and for a while everything seemed fine.  If a foreign student was enrolled the parents had to pay for a local’s tuition, which gave the school a healthy mix of children.

The school was supposed to be non-denominational, which meant the teachers were not allowed to subject students to their religious beliefs. Teachers were also not allowed to beat the children, a practice that was rampant in the other schools on the Island.  Mac and I endorsed these policies, and were happy that such a school was in place for our children.

By the time the school was moved to the new location on the flat Reny Hill was no longer able to be actively involved.  Her husband Jimmy had issues that needed her attention, and she herself had become quite frail. The school had a head-mistress, but without Reny’s gentle participation the school’s policies began to unravel.

The day Rachel came home from school and announced that lobster was an “a-bum-a-nation” Mac and I laughed, it was cute the way she said it, and the earnest expression on her face made it even funnier. However, she took what her teacher had told her seriously, and refused to eat lobster. The following week pork was the “a-bum-a-nation”, and this time Mac and I didn’t laugh.  We realized that Rachel’s teacher was pushing her religious dietary beliefs on to the children, something the school’s policy did not allow.

Mac and the other two Trustees went to the school and spoke to the teacher as well as the head-mistress about the situation, stressing that the school was to remain non-denominational.  The teacher became surly, she didn’t appreciate being rebuked for passing along what she felt her students needed to learn, especially when warned she would lose her job if it happened again.  The atmosphere at the school gradually changed, surliness can do that, and it lost the happy vibe it had enjoyed for so many years.

One day a local parent came to see Mac, visibly distressed by the treatment his daughter had received at the school.  The teacher in question had not beaten his daughter with a stick but she had certainly been punished in a manner that was totally unacceptable.  The parent told Mac that his daughter had been forced to stand on one foot in the broiling sun for an extended period of time, and had come home in tears.  Vanessa and Rachel had witnessed the punishment, the entire school body had been treated to the spectacle of the small girl roasting in the sun on one foot, and Mac decided that enough was enough!

The teacher insisted that he had not beaten the child so he had not disobeyed school policy. Mac argued (in vain) that the punishment was a form of beating, one did not necessarily need a stick to hurt a child. In the end, the head-mistress kept her staff and we withdrew Vanessa and Rachel from the Lower Bay school.  Without Reny Hill’s influence the school was unraveling or, as Mac so aptly put it, “de tail was wagging de dog”.  We decided to home school the children, we had met “yachties” who used the Calvert School correspondence course with great success and were willing to give it a try.  It was a daunting move, I would have to find time to teach the girls, but I felt we were doing the right thing.