In other words, Bishop Sycamore High School seems more like a Football Club in Columbus than any kind of school, even though filings to the Department of Education sees them claiming to be “one of the best academic institutions in the country.”
Behind the BS saga (honestly, the name mocks us) seems to be two key figures (at the moment, because Lord knows what will be uncovered by the time we run this). Andre Peterson is said to be a founder and the administrator of the school, and he claims that all they’re trying to do is give low-income, underprivileged youngsters a chance. That may all sound good and noble, but interviews with parents who had their kids enrolled at BS suggest that there was never any actual schooling going on and that some kids forfeited their high school diplomas because they transferred to BS before graduating. Peterson also claims that BS is registered as a non-charter, non-tax-supported school which apparently means they can operate outside of normal systems because of their “truly held religious beliefs.”
To understand what that means, we turn to the second figure in this strange tale of high school football, because while BS says it provides online courses to the kids, there are serious discrepancies about what these courses actually are and where they’re coming from. Not to mention the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any actual school location with a football field for them to practice, with some previously enrolled students saying that at one point, they simply practiced in the backyard of some apartment they were staying at. Furthermore, these kids were often moved around because they got thrown out of hotels and apartments after BS didn’t pay the rent. Ah yes, good old school.
Anyway, the now-fired coach Roy Johnson explained that the school was supposedly founded by ministers (no one knows who they are) and that BS teaches life lessons infused with Biblical themes. “When we talk about speaking with one voice, we talk about the Tower of Babel,” Johnson said. It’s like if Sunday school also included a football game every once in a while, which, honestly, would be fine if it weren’t for the serious safety concerns of these kids whose conditioning is a far cry from standard practices.