Church mentors pulled from Marysville school after complaint

Published 10:40 pm Wednesday, March 4, 2009

MARYSVILLE — Rianne Olver laughed when she first saw the message on her 11-year-old daughter’s My Space page.

“Hey, 628 tonight! 6 o clock, free espresso for visitors. Super rad games and activities. Hang out with cool people. Plus you are really cool so it would just make it that much cooler. Are you going to be there? If you need a ride, I can hook it up :)”

“At first it was just a joke. Like who wants to give my kid espresso on a school night?” Olver said.

Olver got angry when she realized it wasn’t a joke. The message was from a 19-year-old woman who met her daughter at Totem Middle School and wanted to bring the girl to a youth group meeting, called 628, at Turning Point Church.

Olver didn’t know who was talking to her daughter. She was shocked to learn that the church sends interns to chat with students once a week at her daughter’s school.

Olver complained to church and school leaders last week. After that, Turning Point pulled its volunteers out of Marysville schools, where they have been welcome in previous years.

The district is investigating the situation.

The Marysville church sends young interns to volunteer as informal mentors who keep an eye on students during lunch, and plan games and activities, said Gail Miller, assistant superintendent of the Marysville School District.

Many of the district’s schools use volunteers to help keep order during lunchtime. The church’s interns are part of that. They aren’t supposed to mention religion unless students bring up the subject, Miller said. And they also aren’t supposed to collect students’ phone numbers or My Space addresses, she said.

“It would be inappropriate to initiate a contact with a student outside of the school day using information they got from the student while on campus,” she said.

Turning Point’s senior pastor, Mike Villamor, said the church is looking into the incident and trying figure out what went wrong. Interns are trained to respect school authority, he said.

“We don’t know for sure what took place,” Villamor said. “What I can tell you is it has never been the policy at Turning Point to break any rules. I actually have been very intentional about teaching our people to work within whatever rule structure exists.”

School officials are also talking to students to see if Turning Point members have initiated conversations about religion, which could muddy, or violate, the separation of church and state.

“We have voluntarily taken all our teens off of the school campuses, just as a statement to the school district and even to the mother, to let people know that we want our interns trained correctly,” Villamor said.

If school officials determine this was an isolated incident, the Turning Point volunteers will be asked to retake a volunteer training course. Once they repeat the course, which emphasizes maintaining boundaries with students, they may return to schools, Miller said.

If school officials determine that church members are using the volunteer program to recruit kids to go to church, Miller said, the district would “revisit the program.”

Olver said she wouldn’t mind church members volunteering to tutor students, but she doesn’t think they’re helping the school by wandering the lunchroom, talking to kids.

“To me, it’s really disturbing to know there are adults at the school sitting down with the kids saying, ‘Hey, can I have your My Space and your phone number,’” Olver said. “It’s a huge red flag. It’s really creepy.”

Olver grew up in Hawaii with a spirituality tied closely to island culture, she said, and encourages her daughter to explore different faiths. But it’s wrong for adult outsiders to groom a sixth-grader during the day at a public school, she said.

“If she wants to go to church, she can go to church,” Olver said. “But I don’t want her being bribed into going to a church.”

The church has no desire or intent to recruit anybody, the pastor said.

“In fact that’s actually contrary to my way of thinking, my policies, my belief,” Villamor said. “But we do want to give every person an opportunity to hear about how much God loves them. We want to be very instrumental in helping young people stay off drugs and alcohol and stay out of gangs.”

Kaitlin Manry: 425-339-3292, kmanry@heraldnet.com.