Ex-students, teachers say Spokane Valley Christian school harmed more than it taught

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By Cassy Benefield | FāVS News Associate Editor

CORRECTION: The date The Oaks board of directors responded to Jill Wright’s letter has been corrected.

SPOKANE VALLEY, Wash. — Jill Wright thought she’d found a nurturing school built around critical thinking and a love of learning. Instead, she says, she watched her sons suffer years of what she now calls emotional and spiritual harm at The Oaks Classical Christian Academy.

“I chose a school that I thought would be nurturing and [that focused] on that education piece, like reading and really critical thinking,” said Wright, the mother of two former students and a former teacher’s aide at The Oaks. “I was looking for a safe place for my kids to learn and explore and be curious.”

She describes what she got instead as a “scholastic cult,” that promoted the study of classic Western literature largely absent of women and nonwhite men, infused with “rigid” Christian virtues. 

Her family’s experiences did not begin that way, she said.

A former Whitworth adjunct professor with a master’s in special education, Wright’s background led her to believe The Oaks was just what she and her husband, Joel, wanted for their sons.

“It was like, ‘Oh, this is exciting. This is really academic. This is really rigorous. This is really … school … done well by Christians [who are] kind. Loving,’” Wright said, noting that by 6th grade, all students have read the Bible. “The remarkable proficiency of students to memorize and the list of literature [would] make you question how you ever made it in life.”

The ‘switch’ after the ‘bait’

She describes what her sons received instead felt like a “bait and switch,” with the Grammar (elementary level) part of its classical Trivium model being the better part of what the school provided her children.

“It was our experience that The Oaks misrepresented practices in Logic (middle school) and Rhetoric (high school) stages, at least in how it implemented the methods, which resulted in unnecessary suffering,” she wrote in a letter to the board on March 11, 2020.

Wright said she watched her oldest son, Aidan, eventually suffer a physical and mental health crisis. Her youngest, Tristan, conformed to rigid rule-following, abandoning the risk-taking spirit that the school celebrated in him.

“Our introverted son, an honor roll student, told us he did not want to be a Christian like those at The Oaks,” Wright said. When Aidan was halfway through his junior year, she said he told them, “‘I cannot go back to school. That is not a safe place for me.’”

“Our youngest … was admired for his willingness to take risks and fail,” Wright said. “As he entered the logic stage we saw him become afraid of making choices because he wanted to please.”

The Wrights eventually moved their sons into public schools to finish their education.

The Oaks seals its connection with Doug Wilson

Wright said she suspects that when The Oaks became accredited within the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS) on Jan. 24, 2007 — the year Aidan was in first grade — that’s when the school began to shift out of its nurturing roots. 

“I think their intentions are good but … the best intentions can harm, and there was harm … and there continues to be harm,” she said.

The Oaks, located in Spokane Valley, is one of approximately 532 member schools within the ACCS in 48 states and 17 countries. Within these, The Oaks is one of 89 schools currently that have achieved accreditation status. 

At the same time, while most of the Christian private schools in Washington are state-accredited, The Oaks is not, nor has it strived to be, said Colton Kaltenfeldt, communications manager at Washington State Board of Education. Last year, about 350 students passed through the doors of The Oaks Classical Christian Academy.

The school boasts achievements such as 95% of their graduates are college bound with 40% of them entering engineering, science and medical fields. Their mission statement reads, “The Oaks exists to partner with parents who seek to graduate classically educated young men and women who glorify Christ, shape culture, and shine the light of God’s truth in every endeavor of life.”

What is not included on the website is that the organization that accredited them was founded by Christ Church Pastor Doug Wilson — a proponent of an eventual American Chrisitian theocracy where a married woman’s right to vote would be repealed and replaced by household voting. This Christian Republic would also criminalize the “sin” of homosexuality in the context of God’s grace and common law. 

History of the ACCS and its connection to Pete Hegseth

Founded in 1993 in Moscow, Idaho, the ACCS is currently headquartered there along with Wilson’s church, a school, a college, a seminary and a publishing house — all of which he founded. 

The U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth co-wrote a book with ACCS President David Goodwin titled “Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation,” which advances a conservative Christian view of education.

The book calls Christians to “join the insurgency” by supporting classical Christian education as defined by the ACCS and by placing their children in these schools to give “our kids at least a fighting chance to save America and Christendom.”

Hegseth also promoted the ACCS and their classical Christian model by lauding the Classical Learning Test (CLT) and the need for all U.S. Military Service Academies, like the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, to accept CLT scores as an alternative to the SAT and ACT. 

“The CLT is the gold standard, and our academies need to attract the very best,” Hegseth posted on X May 3, 2025, despite critiques against CLT scores, including its myopic focus on Western civilization.

The CLT is now accepted by hundreds of colleges and several state university systems, along with regional Christian schools like Whitworth and Seattle Pacific.

‘A good education’ despite Wilson’s influences

Wright was aware of Wilson’s influence at The Oaks from the beginning from family members whose children attended the school. 

“My family did say … this is a good education …  but the theology is a little bit out there,” Wright said in a 2024 Sons of Patriarchy podcast on the difference between classical education and classical Christian education.

When her family first met with The Oaks, she added, then headmaster, Bruce Williams gave them the book, “Repairing the Ruins: The Classical and Christian Challenge to Modern Education.” The book was edited by Wilson and released by Canon Press, the publishing company he founded.

For a long time, Wright was the school’s biggest cheerleader to her boys, when they went through challenges there. She and her husband Joel would defend the way The Oaks educated their children because they believed in their system. 

“We continually gave The Oaks the benefit of the doubt, too, because we trusted that they were well intentioned Christian men and women,” she wrote in a letter to the school’s board of directors, which was also posted to The Oaks Alumni Letters Blog in 2020.

Instead, she realized her sons weren’t thriving as much as she hoped. 

“Our sons endured much of their years at The Oaks to honor us,” she wrote. She added later the school confuses excellence with perfection, age-appropriate misbehavior with sin and rigor with “religiousness.” Religiousness defined by her as performance-based morality, rule-bound rigidity and thought termination that most often came in the form of Bible verses meant to stop questions. 

“A rigorous education has elements of stress but The Oaks fosters an environment of chronic stress extinguishing love for learning,” she wrote, including in her letter the harmful behaviors she witnessed toward her sons and others. She said teachers publicly shamed students, signaling them out for their personality or character, on the board or in corporate classroom prayer, naming their “sin.” 

“Checking clothing labels to ensure proper uniform compliance, throwing items at students, and threatening to throw away work that did not meet teachers’ expectations are a few of these behaviors we addressed with administrators,” Wright wrote.

“They are aware of the patterns of verbal and non-verbal behaviors and contact between students and teachers that lead to emotional, social, cognitive and somatic consequences,” she continued in her alumni letter. She said she would call what she witnessed abuse today, a word she did not use in her letter. 

The board of directors responded to Wright’s letter months after she sent it.

“We acknowledge that we need to continue to pursue Christ-like love through humble repentance when we have been aware of our failures and shortcomings,” wrote the board in their response.

That statement was the closest thing to a direct apology, but she said none of her specific grievances were addressed nor did individual administrators reach out to her afterward.

She said she can now see that The Oaks’ “off theology” promoted more indoctrination of the school’s brand of Christianity and Christian virtues rather than the critical thinking the school promised the parents of its students.

The model student 

Olivia Dupree, who graduated in 2012, calls herself an Oaks “lifer,” having attended K-12. She said she loved her experience at the school. However, like Wright, she fully realized its harmful impacts after she left.

“I was in love with The Oaks for years,” Dupree wrote in a post uploaded to The Oaks Alumni Letter blog about a week before Wright’s letter was published. She added, however, that her love for The Oaks was toxic. “I worshipped it like an abusive lover, a thrilling drug that made me feel brave and desperate, adored and despised, powerful and empty at the same time.”

While the school was teaching her the Western canon, it also taught her to “go to war” with her body “to protect [her] brothers from stumbling,” she wrote in her alumni letter. She said it sowed the seeds of a hatred for her developing body. She wore extra vests or jackets over her uniform, even in the warmer months, and she wore a compressed sports bra or two because she “thought being smaller chested was better.” 

Less than a month after graduating from The Oaks, she underwent breast reduction surgery, explaining she “went to great lengths to change myself thinking it was the righteous thing to do.”

‘Biblical’ gender roles taught at The Oaks

She also learned The Oaks version of gender roles. In 8th grade, she took “Women of Wisdom,” where she learned Proverbs 31 and learned to bake, while the boys in her class took an elective called “Leadership.”

“Somehow, there was this collective understanding that leadership just wasn’t meant for female students,” she said. “I was not interested in marriage or relationships for a long time because the only models [of marriage] I had seen [were where] the wife got swallowed up by the husband.”

One example she lamented, without knowing the full story, was when valedictorian Margaret Ansett, who was about seven years above her, married her homeroom teacher Charlie Dowers, who is now the school’s headmaster, two years after she graduated from high school.

Dowers did not respond to FāVS News’ request for comment.

The Rev. Carter Smith-Stepper, who leads St. Aidan’s Anglican Church in the Perry District, taught history at The Oaks between 2015 and 2018, without a degree in history but with an undergraduate and graduate degree in theology. 

He also found the marriages to former students as “an ick,” noting that fathers would sometimes “orchestrate courtship” between teachers and their graduated daughters. He said he saw this at least twice during his time there, while being Wright’s son Aidan’s 10th grade history teacher.

In addition, he saw the gender roles reinforced in school through “stated rules … and unstated expectations.” The final straw of his leaving came after he was told in an all-male faculty meeting that he “did not have enough gravitas,” which he said meant he wasn’t “masculine enough.”

He regretted not speaking up and fighting for his perspective of a more generous Christianity. One big regret includes his complicity in the annual Civil War reenactments where women would not be allowed to be generals, but he was required to act as a Confederate general, “just to get along.”

“I still feel some guilt over that,” Smith-Stepper said. 

He said the school portrayed the Old South as a “Christian civilization,” promoted a “both-sides” view of slavery through reenactments, and reinforced elitism with a hierarchy where seniors got steak and younger students got hot dogs.

“I think that a lot of these kids leave here without humility,” Smith-Stepper said.

If a parent came to him today asking his advice about attending The Oaks, he said he would “actively advocate against it.” He said the school uses “classical education” marketing but would tell the parents to look beyond that.

“Don’t believe what’s on the label. They are going to teach your kid an ideology,” he said. “That ideology is going to be orbiting the culture war from a Christian right perspective.”

“A fundamentalist is still a fundamentalist,” he said.

The Oaks administration did not respond to FāVS News’ request for a comment.

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