In 2020, I had a front row seat to watch as
Maranatha High School in Pasadena fell away from its Christian mission due to poor leadership decisions, including participating in the Black Lives Matter movement, leftist ideology & cancel culture. It was out of control. Families started to get really angry that they were paying for a Christian education, but instead found radical left ideology indoctrinating their students.
A group of parents formed a group called One Heart One Voice to push back against the school on these items and keep Maranatha High School accountable. They met monthly, sent out emails, messages, and confronted the school leadership about various poor leadership decision led by none other than
Maranatha Head of School John Rouse (are you seeing a pattern yet?). The One Heart One Voice leader had tried to recruit us to the group and encouraged us to speak up about any issues we were having and especially to make sure the school was returning to its Christian roots.
While I agreed with the premise of keeping the school on mission as a Christian school, my wife and I didn't get involved in the group, but after the leader encouraged us to speak up, we decided to give
Maranatha Board President, Pastor Corey Ishida, a call in January 2022 to discuss a couple of concerns.
We spoke very briefly about a couple of concerns, most notably the sports department:
1) The sports department continued to bypass the rules of
CIF-Southern Section and recruited athletes from other schools who did not share the Christian values of Maranatha families, preventing the kids who pay to go there from having the advertised experience while the school recruits athletes. So not only was this against the league rules, they also gave these recruited athletes a free ride many times and 100% of the time scholarship dollars, adding insult to injury.
Ishida's response was nothing like what we expected. I honestly thought he was going to thank us and tell us he would look into it and make sure this isn't happening. Instead of humility and concern, Cory Ishida said without a thought, "Every school is doing that," citing his grandson's public school in South LA as an example. Yet, here we were spending tens of thousands of dollars a year to send our students to a Christian school and are told that his grandson's public school cheats and breaks the rules, so why wouldn't Maranatha? Shocking.
Less than a week later, our kids were being targeted and quarantined continuously for up to 8 weeks of missed school. Ishida had told Rouse about our conversation, and now Rouse was retaliating on us for speaking up. For speaking the truth, which he didn't want to hear.
Then, in another outright twist, Rouse threatens to kick our students out of the school immediately for "questioning COVID" and emailing "his staff" and questioning the school's sovereignty in all things, it seemed. Yet to the One Voice One Heart group who sent Rouse emails like "Shame on You" for inviting leftist speakers and falling away from the faith, he responded totally differently, catering to their every whim, and I believe even offering free tuition if the families would take the website and blog down.
