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More Quest teachers face probe
More articles on this topic: Quest program (Vancouver)Two more former Vancouver teachers are being investigated in connection with a controversial outdoor education program led by Tom Ellison, another former teacher that The Vancouver Sun revealed Friday is charged with sexual misconduct involving teenage female students.
The B.C. College of Teachers refused to provide details but confirmed that Dean Hull and Stan Callegari are being investigated for their conduct while teachers with the Quest program at Prince of Wales secondary school in the 1970s and 1980s. Both were dismissed from teaching positions in recent years.
The Sun reported Friday that Ellison, a former Prince of Wales teacher, has been charged with eight counts of sexual misconduct involving six teen students, who are now adult women.
The offences allegedly happened between 1972 and 1982. Some of the charges stem from alleged incidents during trips aboard Ellison’s sailboat, Nostradamus, in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The B.C. College of Teachers opened a file on Ellison after police advised it this summer that criminal charges had been laid in June 2004.
By then, investigations by the college of the two other Quest teachers — Callegari and Hull — were underway, the college’s director of professional conduct, Shirley Nakata, said Friday.
“I can’t get into the details of [the investigations],” Nakata said. “I can tell you that they are related to the issues that have been raised with respect to Mr. Ellison.”
The college began investigating Hull in 2004 after he was terminated by the Surrey school board and Callegari in 2005 after he was dismissed by the Vancouver school board.
Hull had left teaching in Vancouver after Quest was shut down in 1987. He then worked at a Surrey secondary school from 1990-2003.
Asked about the length of time that the college’s investigation has taken, Nakata replied: “We have an enormous backlog of investigation cases, and these cases are part of that backlog. We have two investigators dealing with over 100 cases. Some of these cases, including these two, are not simple.”
Surrey spokesman Doug Strachan refused to say why Hull was terminated, citing privacy concerns. Vancouver school superintendent Chris Kelly also wouldn’t say why Callegari was dismissed.
The three men were identified by Vancouver school superintendent Chris Kelly at a news conference Friday as the main teachers with Quest, an outdoor education program described by former students as “cult-like.”
None of the men currently has a B.C. teaching certificate because they stopped paying their fees, Nakata said.
The college, as the teaching profession’s regulatory body, reviews the conduct of teachers and former teachers whenever they are disciplined, suspended or dismissed by a school board.
The Quest program was an experimental education program that took students on adventure trips in B.C., including overnight camp-outs, hiking near Whistler, and nine-day canoe trips to the Bowron Lakes, east of Quesnel.
Former Quest program students described an unusual closeness between teachers and students. Some trips included skinny-dipping and nude sunbathing, which was encouraged by the teachers, students told The Sun.
Kelly told a news conference Friday that there is no indication the alleged incidents involving Ellison, which led to criminal charges, took place on school property or during school hours.
He said Ellison taught at Prince Of Wales from 1972 to 1988 and was involved in Quest until it ceased to operate in June 1987. It was replaced with the Trek program, which put more emphasis on academic work while continuing as an outdoor activities program.
Vancouver school officials said rumours about inappropriate sex in the Quest program swirled for years. School board chairman Ken Denike said he heard stories in 1984 when first elected, but they were essentially “echoes” at that time because the school principal, John Chalk, had already changed the program.
He said the rumours were about “ceremonies that were highly sexual in nature,” he said, adding he didn’t know what changes Chalk introduced, whether the teachers were disciplined, or why no further action was taken at the time. “Until somebody makes a complaint, there’s very little you can do,” he said.
Kelly took a similar position at a highly unusual news conference, arranged quickly at a downtown hotel Friday morning by a public-relations firm, after The Sun published a story about the charges against Ellison.
“As far as can be determined, there is no record of any formal complaint,” said Kelly, who was joined at the news conference by secretary-treasurer Brenda Ng and school board lawyer Wendy Harris.
“We’re deeply concerned by these allegations and we’re highly aware of how disturbing they are for all involved,” he said. “If there were formal complaints that had come to our attention, we would have acted on them at the time.”
Kelly said the school board became aware of the investigation in 2000 — seven years after police say it started — but did not make any public comment because “we felt it was best left in their [police] hands and not up to us to make any announcements.”
Although charges were laid against Ellison in 2004, the school board was not informed until just weeks ago, the superintendent said. Board officials sought help from Peak Communications and were preparing to make a public statement when The Vancouver Sun broke the story, he added.
“[We were] preparing our own ability to respond effectively to what is bound to be myriad concerns and questions,” he said, adding they wanted to bring it to the public’s attention as soon as possible.
“I can tell you that we were literally at that threshold within the matter of the last 24 hours,” he said, but plans had to be expedited and a hotel room booked for a news conference when The Sun published the story.
Kelly said the school board was then, and is now, “duty bound” to investigate any formal complaint about a school employee. Asked if inquiries are ever conducted as a result of rumours, he replied: “On a persistent rumour? That would really depend on the context and the circumstances.”
He said he couldn’t give details about the rumours, say when they were being traded around the school, or describe what — if anything — was done as a result. The board has launched a review, which Kelly described as critical, to determine what was known at the time and what was done.
Asked if the district should have investigated the rumours, Kelly replied: “Speculatively speaking? I would imagine. I don’t know the circumstances of those times, nor the details, nor the facts. So I can’t offer an opinion on what was done, or what should have been done, or what wasn’t done.”
He said he didn’t know if any Quest teachers were ever reprimanded.
The Quest program operated from 1974 until 1987. A former participant, Jennifer Rees, said students who wanted to attend were interviewed by the teachers who delivered the program and those who were chosen were often a little shy and in need of a challenge.
“These weren’t the popular kids,” she noted.
While the program was in Prince of Wales, it was in a separate area and the students did not attend any classes with non-Quest students. Students were encouraged to leave their old friends and bond with their new group, she said.
The program emphasized outdoor activities such as running, canoeing and camping, with academics receiving little attention. Rees said she had to repeat some subjects the following year to catch up.
Denike confirmed that, saying it was “free-running, modelled on the California outdoor schools.” It lost favour among many in the late 1980s as concern grew about academic performance and the ability of students to get into university. It was replaced in 1987 by the Trek program, which aimed for a better balance between outdoor education and academics.
“It was very cult-like,” Rees recalled of her years in the Quest program.
She recalled the teachers seemed “cool” because they valued the opinions of students.
“We were free to express anything we wanted,” she said. “To young, impressionable, 16-year-old girls, you look at these guys and have this enormous trust in them.”
She recalled Ellison and another Quest teacher interviewed her with her mother present before she was accepted into the program. She said her mother told the teachers: “You realize you’ve got 16-year-old vulnerable children and you’ve got to really watch yourselves.”
Rees, who graduated from Prince of Wales in 1979 and now works in advertising, recalled Ellison at the time lived aboard his sailboat, Nostradamus, which he used in summer to take Quest students out for two weeks to teach them how to sail. Students paid $200 each for the co-ed trip, she recalled.
Ellison would also invite students down to clean his boat after school, she said.
She recalled she kept a diary during her trips, which police investigators seized as evidence years ago.
Many students adored Ellison and thought he was a great teacher who imparted his love of nature and B.C.’s coastal waters, Rees said.
“I have a lot of really good memories of that program,” she recalled. “There was a group of people who loved him.”
Another former student, Janet Rygnestad, was in the Quest program in 1982 and graduated from Prince of Wales in 1984.
“Quest was kind of like a cult,” said Rygnestad, now a microbiologist who lives on an island off Nanaimo.
“These guys were gods. They were young guys. They were good-looking, all of them. They were so powerful. We all looked up to them,” she recalled of the Quest teachers.
Rygnestad, who was interviewed by police about the case five years ago, said she was never sexually involved with Ellison, but she said he had asked her to “help clean his boat.”
She said beyond the issue of the sexual allegations, she believes girls such as herself were damaged psychologically by their experiences in Quest because it was a male-dominated group that treated female students poorly.
“It was the patriarchal mind games,” Rygnestad said.
She said the “Questies” in the school were portrayed as being the “granola” or alternative students on the fringe of society.
She considered pursuing assault charges against one of the teachers because she alleged she was punched in the face during one of the Quest trips.
But she never even told her parents about the incident. The 39-year-old said she hadn’t had the strength earlier in life to face those memories again — until the police visited five years ago.
Now the mother of a 10-year-old girl, she believes she needs to finally speak out about what she says was the worst-kept dirty-little-secret on Vancouver’s west side.
“I was more than happy to talk to [the police] about it,” Rygnestad said.
Ellison will go to trial Oct. 10 in Vancouver Provincial Court. Five of the charges allegedly involve incidents that took place between 1978 and 1982 aboard the Nostradamus in the territorial waters of B.C. or near the Queen Charlotte Islands.
Ellison’s teaching certificate was cancelled in 1996 for non-payment of fees. He currently runs an adventure tour company in Vancouver using his 22-metre yacht, Ocean Light II, which is worth more than $1 million.
He skippers the vessel, which takes groups of up to 10 guests to southern Alaska, the Queen Charlotte Islands and the Khutzeymateen Valley, a grizzly bear sanctuary north of Prince Rupert.
One of the founding teachers of the Quest program, Chris Harris, now a nature photographer living at 108 Mile Ranch, was out of town Friday and unavailable for comment about his recollections of the program.
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