Christian School Grows -- Bear Creek School Is On A Mission To Combine Religious Instruction With A Grounding In Western Thinking And Classical Education

Nine years ago, Nancy Price started the Bear Creek School with two students in her daughter Anna's bedroom.

To make room, Anna, a second-grader, bunked in her 3-year-old sister's room. Anna's bedroom was then stocked with books, English- and Spanish-language wall hangings, a blackboard and colorful math toys.

"We'd go in there and close the door - we'd be in school," Price recalls.

The private Christian school has since grown to 280 students housed at two Eastside churches. And plans are afoot to build an $11 million school on Novelty Hill for 450 students by the 1999-2000 school year.

Nationwide, Christian school populations are growing 4 percent to 8 percent annually, according to the Association of Christian Schools International, whose members educate 15,000 students in Washington and 800,000 nationwide.

Bear Creek, however, differs from many of them in its "classical model" approach. Learning is based on three stages: grammar, or mastery of basic facts, in early grades; dialectics, the teaching of logic and argument, in middle years; and rhetoric, an emphasis on speech and writing, in upper grades.

The school is one of 58 in the Association of Classical and Christian Schools, founded in 1993 in Moscow, Idaho. Each school requires two years of Latin or Greek, a year of logic classes and a year of formal rhetoric.

When Price moved to the Northwest from Southern California in the 1980s, she searched in vain, she said, for a school that combined Christianity with a liberal-arts core.

Bear Creek's students learn Latin and read works from Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Thomas More, Mark Twain, C.S. Lewis, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe and several non-Western writers. European History class exposes them to Marx, Voltaire, and Machiavelli's "The Prince," which advocates strategic use of deception and force to preserve the state.

"He's blatantly evil - he's a bad guy that you've got to understand," Price said of Machiavelli.

"We want our kids to understand the world in which they live, and you can't do that reading only Christian authors. A lot of times, Christian kids go to university and lose their faith because they run into those ideas for the first time."

Bear Creek students pray and study the Bible daily. On Wednesday morning, seventh-graders evaluated the Rule of St. Benedict, which prescribed austere living conditions for Catholic monks.

The school's own regimen requires green uniforms with khaki pants for boys, skirts for girls.

Sixth- through ninth-graders clean and vacuum their building at Grace Church in Redmond. Classes for children in kindergarten through grade five are held at Bear Creek Community Church on Avondale Road Northeast, and students wear red-and-blue uniforms.

Each year from now, the school will add one grade level, and the first seniors will graduate in 2001. (Anna Price and pioneer classmate Katherine Shaffer are now juniors at public high schools.)

As the students mature, they'll be expected to work in food banks and collect donations for charities, Price said.

On Wednesday, eighth-graders Aletheia Cano and Candace Newsome walked to their classroom with arms around each other, singing the theme from television's "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood."

"You're a lot closer to the people you're around. You can be yourself a lot more. Like dancing and singing down the halls. You do what you want, and you won't be judged," said Newsome, who switched to Bear Creek from a public school two years ago.

The school reports that its median reading score on the Stanford Achievement Test is the 91st percentile, and its math score is in the 94th percentile. Entrance testing and interviews are required of new students. Tuition ranges from $2,885 to $4,425, and some scholarships are available.

Bear Creek is one of 16 private schools within the boundaries of the Lake Washington School District, which encompasses Kirkland, Redmond and the north Sammamish Plateau. New School Board member Nancy Bernard teaches science part time at Bear Creek.

In April, the fund drive for the new Bear Creek school goes public. The school's parents, who have been raising money since 1994, will hear a detailed financial report next week. Construction plans call for a sports field, a gymnasium, a photo darkroom, science labs, a student store, a stage, a library and music rooms, none of which exist now.

School backers will seek donations from Eastside businesses, plus a spark of divine inspiration.

"We can do all things through Christ who strengthens us," Price says, borrowing an adage from the New Testament.

Mike Lindblom's phone message number is 206-515-5631. His e-mail address is: mlin-new@seatimes.com