32 WBCA

WBCA

Several pastor friends envisioned a Christian school, and held a few meetings, in which we agreed that the school would be a nondenominational consortium of churches and parents. They drafted me to lead the effort, probably thinking that I would be their QBC connection and hoping to use my church’s school facility in its fairly new Administration building; this would be ideal, having previously housed a pre-school. Anyhow, I became the chairman of the new school’s first board; we chose an ambitious name “West Bay Christian Schools Inc”, enlisted a headmaster and staffed the school through grade 8, expecting to expand through grade 12 as our pupils moved along.

In those days we met monthly in the evening, talking over mostly financial matters (I expect they still do); it was evident that our school was deficient in quality of education, chiefly mathematics, and that teacher pay (many were volunteers) would be an issue. We set tuition low to be affordable to parents and attract as many students as we could, but a new school lacked the credibility and “clout” of an older, endowed, institution (we also made tuition free to children of ministers from the association’s member churches and to those of the school’s staff).

The school had a modest uniform, consisting of a tie and appropriate white shirt for boys, and comparable wear for girls; the ties were wool, of a distinctive plaid.

Our headmaster resigned the first year, and we hired a new one, now that the challenging job was better defined, one whose heart was in the undertaking for the longer haul it would take. The board decided that the school, now called “West Bay Christian Academy”, would go only through grade 8, at least for the foreseeable future.

Our new headmaster lived with his wife (who became our gym teacher) and their four children in a nearby house donated to them for that purpose by a patron in QBC. He spearheaded certification of the school with the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI), and became a mentor to the school’s staff, upgrading them (he was an able fund-raiser), and enlarged enrollment. Through the vision, generosity and hard work of the same patron, the school acquired a fine new building complex near QBC, almost at the expiration of the agreement regarding their use of the church facility.

Our two oldest boys finished 8th grade at WBCA in the school’s first graduating classes (the first was small, only eight; the second about the same), and we were effectively priced out by the rising tuition, so we sent all our five kids to public schools (our youngest daughter, Irene, was already at Hamilton Elementary School).

About that time, I resigned from the school’s board, as our children were out of WBCA, and I had no further involvement with the school. After a while I was given a framed paper, signed by the headmaster, recognizing my role in WBCA’s formation and first board.

All our WBCA kids were handicapped in mathematics. Our younger and last sons overcame it, and our oldest son, Joseph, made a successful IT career at CTI and several companies beyond, having tried URI’s engineering program and concluding that it wasn’t for him.

Betsy, our middle child, was uprooted from comfortable WBCA and started public school at Wickford Middle School in 9th grade (the last middle school year), and started next year as a freshman at North Kingstown High School; those years were very hard for her, as the other girls already had their circles of friends from their public school years, whereas our daughter was an outsider. She left our home as a teen, finished high school in East Providence, and after a brief college stint in CO, returned to RI, where she obtained an Associate in paralegal studies.

John and Ben, our younger and last sons, graduated from their separate colleges, and acquired MBA degrees from Columbia and VA respectively, and Irene went to the University of RI.