This marks the third installment of the Finding Faith series, featuring a look into how religion affects and is affected by people in the Gazette’s coverage area.
By Cliff White
Staff Writer
Brian Wilkins stands in front of a roomful of junior high and high school students in Bible study class, comparing the Sea of Galilee to nearby Sebago Lake.
Wilkins, a former student and current teacher at Standish Baptist Academy, is discussing the “Feast of the Five Thousand,” where according to the Gospels, Jesus Christ performed the miracle of feeding 5,000 people with five loaves of bread and two fish. The feast is believed to have taken place in Tabgha, on the banks of the Sea of Galilee.
Wilkins is attempting to make the scene more vivid for his students, to get them to use their familiarity with Sebago Lake to imagine the scene in Tabgha at the time of the feast, he said.
For Wilkins and his students, Bible class is four days a week of intensive study of the New Testament. It is just one way of many that the Standish Baptist Academy, along with the Living Waters Christian School in Buxton – two church-run private schools – provide their students an education based in Christian principles and beliefs.
“It’s not for everyone,” said Living Waters Principal Denise Wingfield. “That’s the first thing I tell those who express an interest in coming here. This school is for middle and high schoolers who are fearless in their faith. They should be prepared to accept that Christ is at the center of what we do here.”
Neither is accredited, though Living Waters is seeking to complete a program of accreditation from the Association of Christian Schools International. Standish Baptist Academy is not seeking accreditations. Yet the schools have maintained steady enrollments because, Wilkins and Wingfield said, they offer an education more in tune with the religious beliefs of its students and their families.
“Parents can send their children here and know they are being educated according to Christian principles and teachings,” Wingfield said. “They feel more comfortable having their children in a setting like ours, where their kids can be open about their feelings toward God and not feel like they have to hide them.”
Living Waters requires all students entering into secondary education and their parents to sign a form pledging the signee abide by all Biblical absolutes and abstain from tobacco, alcoholic beverages, profanity and dishonesty. As part of its application for incoming students, Living Waters asks the pastor from the child’s church if the child has had a salvation experience. The school has a statement of faith under the header “Doctrinal Beliefs,” designed to specifically diagram the religious beliefs under which the school operates.  While tuition costs are $3,245 a year per student in kindergarten through eighth grade and $3,295 per student in high school, tithing members of Living Waters Christian Church receive a $200 discount per student.
Living Waters’ enrollment for the current school year is 62 students. Wingfield said the school’s small size is another reasons why parents choose to send their children there.
“We have the ability to really be a part of the students’ lives here. Nobody falls through the cracks,” Wingfield said. “The students know the teachers and the relationship is as if we were family. There’s a connection you wouldn’t have in a larger setting.”
 Standish Baptist Academy, with its enrollment of 55 students and tuition set at $1,800 annually per student, has many similar rules as Living Waters, though Principal and Pastor Gary Wilkins (father of teacher Brian Wilkins) said while Living Waters is non-denominational, his school adheres rigidly to Baptist beliefs.  Both schools were founded in the mid-1990s, and are directly affiliated with the churches to which they are physically and financially attached.
Students at both schools attend Bible classes four days a week. Due to their small enrollments, both have classes in which multiple grade levels are taught simultaneously in the same classroom by the same teacher. Both have dress codes. And both are committed to offering a high level of education to their pupils, Wingfield and Gary Wilkins said.
“It’s our biggest priority,” Wingfield said.
Living Waters uses “A Beka” textbooks in its classrooms, a company which describes itself as, “Unashamedly Christian and traditional in our approach to education,” on its Web site, www.abeka.com. The school arrived at its decision only after trial periods with other textbooks, and a decision among the faculty that “A Beka” provided the best base for the school’s curriculum, Wingfield said.
The Christian predilection of the school only marginally affects the teaching of math, English and history classes at Living Waters, Wingfield said, though selections from the Bible are used to augment lessons. However, in science classes creationism is taught as truth and evolution is presented as an alternate theory of explanation for how humanity came into existence
Living Waters high school science teacher Pam LaRochelle said the curriculum she teaches discusses evolution only in general terms. Greater emphasis is put on ensuring students are knowledgeable about creationism, the belief that humanity, life, the Earth and the universe were created in their original form by God, as related in the Bible.
“I teach what I believe, and I’m confident that what I believe and what I am teaching is true,” LaRochelle said. “I believe there was a great worldwide flood and not an ice age, that the Earth is no more than 10,000 years old.”
The Standish Baptist Academy uses “A Beka” books as well as texts from Bob Jones University and other Christian educational sources. All courses are taught from what Gary Wilkins calls, “a Christian perspective.”
“All of our classes have some religious component to them,” Wilkins said.
Jennifer Girod teaches history, English and music at Standish Baptist Academy. She said she tries to incorporate a Christian perspective into her lessons when at all possible.
“In English class, we are using sentences that are taken from the Bible or have something to do with Christian belief,” Girod said. “It’s a belief that through constant contact with the Bible and its teachings, even in subjects which may not directly involve the study of the Bible, kids will learn its lessons subconsciously.”
Though it does not teach sex education, Living Waters offers a health education class in which students, “Learn about their developing bodies,” Wingfield said.
“We don’t have a safe sex part of the curriculum, and we don’t hand out contraceptives. We don’t view that as our responsibility,” Wingfield said. “But we’re open with the older kids if they present themselves to us with questions, and we’ll tell them what can happen if they don’t do it God’s way.”
Gary Wilkins said a major concern of his in the first few years after the founding of the Standish Baptist Academy was ensuring graduates would be looked at fairly by colleges. He said he called admissions representatives from several institutions of higher education in Maine, all of whom said in cases where an applicant has attended a school which is operating under non-approved status in the state – as both Standish Baptist Academy and Living Waters are – more weight is put on available objective data which could be used to gauge the student’s aptitude, particularly S.A.T. scores.
“I’m perfectly confident that students are not under-equipped at all if they choose college after graduation,” Gary Wilkins said. “Our students are capable of going on and succeeding academically beyond this school.”
Cornish’s Jaimee Jordan, 17, is a senior at Standish Baptist Academy, who plans on attending West Coast Baptist College in California, where she will study secretarial services. She said she had loved her experience at the academy. Jordan attended South Hiram Middle School, but came to the academy in eighth grade.
“It’s difficult at times being a Christian in a public school,” Jordan said. “You want to talk about God and you don’t feel like you can. At times it feels like you are different than everybody else.”
Jordan said in addition to feeling more comfortable in her surroundings, she enjoys the small class sizes of her school and the close personal relationships she has formed with both faculty and fellow students.
Jordan, along with many other students from both schools, said their biggest frustration has been the lack of extra-curricular opportunities such as clubs or sports teams. While both schools have limited offerings in clubs, sports and community service, both encourage their students to explore opportunities at other schools not available to them otherwise, and actively assist them in doing so.
Saco’s Michael Walker, 17, a junior at Standish Baptist Academy, has been a student at the school since kindergarten. He said anything he had lost through a lack of extracurricular opportunities was more than made up for by the positive experience he has had.
“The school’s small size may keep it from offering all the clubs I would like to see, but I would rather see the school stay small than expand so that it could begin to offer what I wanted,” Walker said. “The small size allows teachers to have personal relationships with all their students, and it completely removes peer pressure from the equation, so that there are no cliques at all. Everybody is forced to get along because the school is small enough where you just need everyone as a friend.”
Steven Harmon, a 13-year-old from Buxton, attends Living Waters. His parents gave him the chance to leave the school last year and attend public school, but after some consideration, Harmon decided to stay at Living Waters.
“I considered leaving, but then I thought, ‘What a fun and safe place this is,’” Harmon said while sitting with friends around a cafeteria table during a break between classes. “I have made a lot of friends here who I would hate to lose if I didn’t get to see as often. And here, I can talk openly about my faith, and be surrounded by people who think and feel similarly to me. It gives me a feeling of more freedom, and I would never want to give that up.”