HERE'S LOOKIN' AT YOU, KID

“Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child;
but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him.” (Proverbs 22:15)

If you’re a resident of Framingham or a MetroWest Community, over the past week you’ve read or heard a lot about Kyle Alleyne unless you’re living in a proverbial cave! On August 9, the body of Alleyne’s wife, Heather (Marcheterre) Alleyne was found in the couple’s Framingham apartment. She died from multiple stab wounds and it’s believed she’d been dead for several days. For several days, law enforcement authorities were looking for Kyle Alleyne. Kyle was arrested on Saturday, August 15 in Laredo, Texas, where he was trying to reenter the United States from Mexico.

Each day for the past several days, Kyle Alleyne’s face has stared at me from the MetroWest Daily News. Kyle’s face is not new to me, however. During the years my three children attended New Covenant Christian School (then in Ashland), Kyle was one of their schoolmates. In fact, Kyle was in my daughter Amy’s class. The Christian school movement has been controversial, and honestly, in a sense it’s been eclipsed by the home schooling movement which is more controversial and more common than ever before. We sent our kids to New Covenant, but we sent all of them to Marian (Catholic) High School in Framingham. (In my opinion, as far as standards and practices, Marian is a lot like a typical public high school of about thirty-five years ago.) There is always the criticism that parents who send their kids to Christian school are trying to shield them from the real world and are doing them a disservice. There’s also the belief that the kids will be so SATURATED with God, the Bible, morality, etc. that they’ll actually grow up to go totally wild. I wrestled with this stuff. I know that many, many kids who grow up in evangelical pastors’ homes end up as atheists or agnostics and are superficial and worldly people. Many deeply resent their upbringing. That’s why we always had decks of playing cards in the house (verboten in many Christian homes) and why we exposed them to (mostly healthy) secular entertainment as well as Christian entertainment. We weren’t perfect parents. We definitely made some mistakes. Today, each of our kids is a professing evangelical Christian and regularly attends church, so we apparently did something right.

That has NOT been the case of every kid who attended New Covenant Christian School, however. I’d say the majority have grown up to be fine Christian young men and women, but some have NOT. I think there WERE the parents who sent their kids to NCCS believing it was a guarantee they’d turn out to be model Christian citizens, and who sent mixed messages to their kids and in most cases that did not work out. NCCS’ philosophy used to be that of a “three-legged stool” meaning: a strong Christian school, a strong evangelical church, and a strong Christian family all working together. I think in MOST cases where all those three were in place, things worked out; but again, there were many kids standing on one-legged stools as it were that toppled over.

New Covenant Christian School had mandatory once a week chapel. Chapel speakers were mostly local pastors who’d come in as guest speakers. I remember some powerful chapel services there. I especially remember a powerful chapel service I did for just the “middle school” aged kids somewhere around twelve years ago. I photocopied pictures of several kids from my high school graduating class, showed the kids the pictures, talked about what each kid was like in high school and what each kid became in adulthood. One kid was the co-captain of the football team. He hung himself in a jail cell about fifteen years after high school. One girl was probably the sweetest and nicest girl in the class. She was murdered on the west coast by a deranged ex-boyfriend. My best friend from 6th grade dreamed of being a movie director. He’s dead- he died of A.I.D.S. around fifteen years ago. Conversely, some kids were kind of “duds” in high school and grew up to be pretty successful. I really tried to impress into these kids about the importance of life’s road ahead. Well, a few years later, one of Amy’s classmates was featured on the Channel 25 evening news. He’d been arrested after committing several local armed robberies. And, now Kyle Alleyne has been arrested as a murder suspect. (I will say it amazes me that Kyle graduated from Framingham High in 2008! Amy graduated from COLLEGE in 2007 and was married in 2008!)

I definitely remember Kyle Alleyne. I THINK he was from a single parent home. As I recall, there was a mom but no father there. Frankly, I remember him as a kid who got in trouble, especially in the higher grades. A couple of my kids have told me they always thought he’d grow up to be something like a drug dealer; although murderer seems somewhat unbelievable.

So what does all this say about Christian school? It was a great experience for my kids, and a great place for my wife to teach, but it's no guarantee that its alumni will all be model citizens. And how does a kid who grows up with nice middle-class “religious” patriotic MetroWest citizens end up like Kyle Alleyne?

Food for thought, isn’t it?