Institutional Abuse at Veritas Academy – Part 5

Read Part 4 here.

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I took a few months to process my pain. Veritas Academy had fired me for my personal convictions: my opinion of Douglas Wilson and one singular description of my personal faith walk with God–neither of which were relevant to my professional performance or my conduct in the classroom. Then Veritas had refused to compensate me for my time working for them.

Both actions were unethical, and the latter, according to my lawyer, was demonstrably illegal.

And there was nothing I could do.

Nothing, that is, but tell the truth. Not for myself–because it had already been made quite clear that injustices I had suffered would not be rectified in this lifetime–but for any other vulnerable, unwitting, innocent employee, student, or even parent at Veritas Academy who, I knew, were just as much at risk for being thrown under the bus as I had been.

In fact, I already knew of one person who had been treated in a similar fashion before me by Veritas. A story about a former student who had been terribly maligned through no fault of her own was shared with me during my interview process. Part of why I had accepted the Academy’s offer of employment in the first place was so that I could have some power to prevent such abuse from happening again.

I decided to exercise the one power that remained to me–indeed, the one power they had hired me for:

Write.

I took a long time to draft and revise a five-page letter to the board of Veritas Academy–some of whom, you will recall, I had already met through the interview process. Ty Fischer had told me he had sought advisement from the board before terminating my employment, yet the board had never heard my side of the story. I thought that they deserved to know in order to be fully informed and, perhaps, thus become enabled to make better, fairer, just decisions in the future.

I shared my intentions with a number of trusted friends and advisors, even sending them drafts and asking for feedback. This included my pastors, who validated and supported my efforts.

Here is the final draft, which I emailed to the board of Veritas Academy on April 3, 2022:

A month later, on May 6, 2022, I received their formal response:

Even then, after all my effort, emotional strain, and sacrifice of time and energy, Veritas Academy had no intention of listening to me.

They could not even afford me the courtesy of an apology–not even an acknowledgement–for all the ways they had hurt me the previous summer.

The best they could offer was, “We are sorry if this interaction has added to your pain,” referring, as I understood it, to this, their final response.

I marveled that they could find it in themselves to feel sorry about that after displaying such a striking deficit of Christian charity regarding everything else.