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A Portland church that kicked a preschool out of its building last year wants to put a Catholic all-boys middle school in its place.
Last spring, WW reported that St. Stephen Catholic Church, located in the Sunnyside neighborhood, had terminated its lease with Childswork Learning Center, the largest preschool in Portland.
Childswork vacated the building July 1, 2021. At issue, the preschool’s operators thought, was parking. The church tore down the playground and replaced it with freshly striped parking spaces. At the time, the parish’s attorney told WW the parish had plans for the space “more directly connected to its core ministry.”
That replacement is the rare item that might prove even more contentious in Portland than parking: a religious school with hardline views on gender identity.
“We plan for this school to be a force for good against evil, right against wrong, and in a local but significant way, the betterment of boys in the continuing national boys crisis,” the Columbia Boys School website reads. “Boys have been under attack from the broader American culture for quite some time.”
The all-boys Catholic middle school will be run by Brian Burby, the president of the school’s board of directors.
He says it will be independent of the Archdiocese of Portland, meaning it can’t call itself Catholic but can operate “in the Catholic tradition”—a move, Burby tells WW, that will shield the school’s values from any archbishop’s influence, either present or future. That’s because he believes Portland’s Catholic schools have become too progressive.
“Our biggest driver in all this: to establish and operate such a school to be a small but important step in the fight to alleviate the boys crisis and help them on their path to honorable Christian Manhood,” Burby tells WW via email.
Catholic schools have gradually become more progressive on certain social issues—like LBGTQ+ rights and premarital sex—in the past few decades. In Portland, that shift has been swifter—a partial product, theologians say, of a region’s politics and beliefs.
Some Sunnyside residents have recoiled at the school’s mission statement. Tiffany Lane, a third grade teacher in Portland Public Schools, wrote to Burby: “I urge you to reconsider these plans and I fully plan to fight for justice and equality.”
In another email, a neighbor who asked to remain anonymous added: “I don’t want my daughters to grow up next door to a school that teaches boys that they are profoundly different from girls…or that toxic masculinity deserves quotation marks.”
WW obtained five other emails sent by neighbors, expressing their intent to fight the school’s opening. But there’s little they can do. Even in a city where neighborhood associations hold plenty of sway in what arrives on the block, a religious institution has the right to lease its property to whomever it pleases.
That means Columbia Boys School, assuming no internal failures in starting it, could soon become an uncomfortable fit in a neighborhood where 93% of voters went for Joe Biden.
A letter that St. Stephen’s Rev. Eric Andersen sent March 1 to homes surrounding the church was the first time neighbors heard of Columbia.
“The new school would serve a group with a clear need: boys in grades 6 through 8,” Andersen wrote. “Our country is witnessing a crisis of teenage boys and young men losing their way these days.”
Andersen wrote that the church would pursue a land use review from the city to allow the school; that’s the same permit the church would have needed to keep Childswork last year.
The city had told the church it needed a land use change to avoid rules that required converting the playground into parking spaces (“Careless,” WW, May 26, 2021). Childswork started applying, but Rev. Andersen signaled he would terminate the lease either way, and Childswork never finished the paperwork.
Andersen invited neighbors to a March 8 listening session at the church’s gym led by a consulting firm that specializes in advising Catholic schools.
The hum of the lights in the beige and dusty gym made it hard to hear. The 11 neighbors who showed up clustered together at round tables.
For an hour, two representatives of the Wisconsin-based Meitler firm, hired by Burby, were peppered with detailed questions about its study and how the church was chosen as the location for the school.
“Are you aware this neighborhood doesn’t want an anti-LGBTQ, sexist institution training boys in this neighborhood?” asked neighbor Edith Casterline.
Many of them characterized Rev. Andersen as a polarizing figure who was unfriendly to neighbors and flouted the mask mandate during large services.
A meeting held three hours later for prospective students’ parents felt markedly different. Beverages were offered. Burby listened to parents and answered questions about the school’s mission. No one wore a mask.
Ten parents showed up. One father said, “The only Catholic school that I trust is our own home,” and all opined how Catholic education options in Portland weren’t truly Catholic anymore.
One woman said she disliked that her son played with girls: “There’s such a push on inclusion that boys forget how to be boys….That’s mental insanity when boys try to be girls.”
Public records show Columbia Boys School was first registered as a business with the state in 2014 under Burby’s name. It’s classified as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. It was dissolved in 2017 and reinstated in July 2021.
Burby, 69, is a former corporate businessman, marketer and salesman. He tells WW he first approached Andersen last summer about using the space.
The school plans to use a teaching approach called the Gurian model that bases its methods on the premise that men’s and women’s brains work differently. (The model has been named in Title IX complaints by the American Civil Liberties Union in at least three states in the past decade.)
Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers is listed as board vice president. He’s a Portland-based evangelist who has written books on masculinity, hosts overseas faith retreats, and appears on Catholic and Christian podcasts and television shows.
He preaches a “return to a proper biblical understanding of femininity and masculinity,” says gay marriage is a mockery of what “God has established between a man and a woman,” and tells parents to “not give in” to kids’ desires to transition between genders.
Andersen is listed as leader of the Portland chapter of EnCourage, a ministry “dedicated to the spiritual needs of…relatives and friends of persons who have same-sex attractions.” Its parent, Courage International, advocates that gay Catholics abstain from sex for life. Andersen will serve as the school’s spiritual director. (He did not respond to WW’s questions.)
Burby tells WW the school will be independent of the Portland Archdiocese in order to protect its mission: “We need to be independent because bishops come and bishops go, some of them may like this, some of them may not.” He did not elaborate on particular values that might be compromised by the church’s oversight.
Portland Archbishop Alexander Sample declined to comment.
The school’s blueprint is unlike any other in Portland. That’s perhaps in part a response to the progressive leanings of Pope Francis, who’s broken step with his predecessors by softening the church’s position on certain social issues like gay marriage and by broadening the church’s acceptance umbrella.
Dr. Zach Flanagin is a professor of theology and religious studies at Saint Mary’s College of California. He says there’s “massive distaste” among some conservative Catholic circles for Pope Francis, “so they’ve decided that they’re the guardians of Catholic tradition.”
Flanagin says this particular movement adopts the “idea that I personally preserve Catholicism, or my subcommittee preserves it, and the bishop cannot be relied upon to do that.”
Burby says “any boy” in grades 6 to 8 is welcome to apply.
At the parents’ meeting, Burby told them there was no school like Columbia in the Northwest, except for one high school in Seattle. He said the school is for the glory of God: “It’s going to take a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of prayer.”
Two hours earlier, during the neighbors’ session, McKay Larrabee had a warning for the school.
“I will not make it comfortable,” she said. “I will hold up signs and I will wrap my house in a rainbow. I will not make it fun or comfortable for them to push their ideology on me.”