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Veering from Evolution

Fired teacher explains his presentation

By Christopher Stollar / The Bulletin

Published: March 25. 2007 4:00AM PST

On Wednesday, March 14, eight days into a new job teaching biology at Sisters High School, Kris Helphinstine showed a class of freshman and sophomore students pictures of naked corpses, a Nazi swastika and Charles Darwin in a PowerPoint presentation.

"What do these pictures have in common?" the 27-year-old part-time teacher asked the 30 students.

They listened as Helphinstine gave a roughly hourlong presentation, explaining how the Third Reich perverted evolution and eugenics to slaughter Jews and Gypsies in death camps to protect the "superior race."

On the Monday and Tuesday before giving the PowerPoint presentation, Helphinstine had given the students supplemental material that included an essay promoting creationism and links to answersingenesis.org.

That Web site is "dedicated to enabling Christians to defend their faith, and to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively."

When parents found out, some quickly complained. As a result, Helphinstine was put on leave Friday, March 16, and the Sisters School Board voted to fire him last Monday. Only board member Steve Rudinsky opposed the measure, saying the teacher should have received a second chance.

The firing has become yet one more issue for a district still grappling with the fallout of a 2006 state audit. The audit found the district inappropriately counted private Christian school students as participants in its homeschool program - earning it about $1.2 million extra.

The firing of Helphinstine - who was hired to teach a one-hour, basic biology class each day mainly to sophomores - may be the first case of its kind in the state, said Randy Harnisch, legal coordinator for the Oregon Department of Education who is also still working with the district on the state audit.

Technically, Helphinstine broke no laws, other than possibly violating a statute that says schools must not engage in religious activity, said Cheryl Kleckner, a science education specialist with the Education Department. The department's official policy statement, released in 2005 by Superintendent Susan Castillo, states:

"We have been getting a number of questions about the teaching of 'creationism' and 'intelligent design.' Here's the state's position: The Oregon Science Content Standards adopted in April of 2001 clearly requires the teaching of evolution. All content standards are adopted through the legislative process and are required in the public schools in Oregon."

Kleckner said only science should be taught in science classes.

"(Students) get confused if you teach religion in a science class. Science is based on evidence. Religion is based on faith," she said.

While Helphinstine may not have broken any laws, board members said he deviated from Sisters' curriculum.

Superintendent Ted Thonstad and Principal Bob Macauley could not be reached for comment last week, which was Sisters School District's spring break.

Several parents reached for this article also refused to comment, citing concerns over the attention it would bring to their children.

What he taught

In his first week at Sisters, Helphinstine conducted lab sessions and taught about the animal kingdoms and other basic topics - as dictated by the curriculum.

He said he also taught the theory of evolution, since that is where the teacher before him left off.

But on Monday, March 12, Helphinstine gave his class an edited and abridged copy of an essay by Ken Ham, a former science teacher from Australia who founded Answers in Genesis.

In the 2003 essay about poodles, Ham argued that poodles are the result of a downward process. They did not just develop from dog genes, but from cursed copies of dog genes.

"Dogs like poodles are the result of the Curse!" Ham wrote in his essay. "Each time I arrive home and our pet Bichon races to the door to meet me, I am reminded of my sin, that I, in Adam, sinned and ushered in the Fall."

Ham wrote later, "After God pronounced everything as 'very good' originally, Adam sinned, resulting in the whole of creation being cursed. Everything began to run down, no longer upheld perfectly by the sustaining power of an infinite creator. As each succeeding generation of creatures (including man) was produced, copying mistakes and mutations affected the genes."

Helphinstine deleted whole passages of the essay and blacked out all religious references in the copy he gave his students because he wanted to focus on Ham's scientific conclusion.

Ham's edited essay that he presented to the class read, "There is an important lesson to learn from this. Many people use natural selection/speciation as a major part of the supposed evidence for the general theory of evolution. However, as we've shown so many times, such changes have nothing to do with this sort of evolution."

It said later, "It is important to gain a correct understanding of science and history so that students will be able to see past any form of indoctrination that may be fed to them."

Helphinstine presented this material for discussion.

"I wanted for the kids to look at the science he was presenting, not the worldview," Helphinstine said in an interview. "That article comes from a biased source. You can see where the bias is - but the scientific information is accurate."

At the bottom of the essay, he left the link to answersingenesis.org, which posts Ham's essay and mentions the Bible and promotes creationism, the idea that God created the world.

On its Web site in a section explaining Answers in Genesis' message, it reads "AiG teaches that 'facts' don't speak for themselves, but must be interpreted. That is, there aren't separate sets of 'evidences' for evolution and creation - we all deal with the same evidence."

It says later in the section, "The difference lies in how we interpret what we study. The Bible -the 'history book of the universe' - provides a reliable, eye-witness account of the beginning of all things."

Helphinstine said he included this essay and other material in his classes because he wanted to encourage students to think critically.

"It was no proselytizing," he said in an interview. "It was, 'Here's what a worldview is, and here's how it affects you.' "

Helphinstine refused to answer questions about his own worldview, whether he is a Christian or what he specifically thinks about creationism and evolution.

The teacher

Raised on the Oregon Coast, Helphinstine said he became interested in science while spending time in the outdoors and fighting fires for the U.S. Forest Service. He is married and has no children.

Helphinstine moved to Central Oregon in December after teaching from 2004 to 2005 at a high school in Washington. After getting tired of the rain, Helphinstine moved to Romania and taught English for a few months. He then came back to the States and fought fires before moving to Redmond last winter.

Helphinstine came from a "pretty conservative, Christian religious view," said Tom Cochran, an Oregon State University professor who worked closely with him during his master's science degree program, which lasted from 2003 to 2004. Helphinstine wrote a final paper about Nazi science and eugenics, tracing its history.

Cochran was surprised to hear that the Sisters School Board fired Helphinstine because he never thought it would become an issue for the young graduate.

Helphinstine taught biology to sophomores for a year in 2004 at Rogers High School in Puyallup, Wash.

While Helphinstine did not use articles from Ham or give a PowerPoint presentation on eugenics as he did at Sisters High School, he had his Washington students explore other theories about the beginning of life besides evolution. He said he told them to develop their own theories about the origin of man, the cause of life and the age of the earth. They were instructed to find people who supported their theories - and those who rejected them.

He received permission from his principal, Scott Brittain.

When he started at Sisters, Helphinstine said he wanted to share some of the ideas on eugenics that he explored in his final paper at OSU. Helphinstine didn't receive any flack from his supervisors in Puyallup, so he figured there wouldn't be a problem in Sisters.

"I made an assumption," he said. "I thought it was OK since I did the same kind of stuff in Puyallup. I've learned from district to district it's a change."

Principal Brittain confirmed that Helphinstine got permission from him ahead of time to present different material. Because the school emphasizes the importance of presenting both sides of the issue, Brittain said yes, but he did not review all of Helphinstine's material.

"I can't tell you all of what he did," Brittain said, adding later that, "it wasn't out of line."

Helphinstine said he received no reprimand in Washington for his teaching or personal beliefs.

"It shouldn't make a difference," Helphinstine said, referring to his personal beliefs. "People jump to a lot of conclusions. I try to focus on the facts."

But Helphinstine did not present "the facts," Sisters school board member Mike Gould said in an interview last week.

"I don't think this is an issue about what somebody does or doesn't believe," Gould said. "That's not important. It's about the source, and it's about kind of deviating from where things are supposed to be played."

Teachers often give outside material to students, but the school board fired Helphinstine last week in part for deviating from the textbook called "Biology: The Dynamics of Life."

The district allows teachers to use outside material, Helphinstine said, but also requires that they stick at least in part to the textbook, which presents evolution as the basis for the beginning of life.

The textbook itself mentions creationism, saying, "Because it is impossible to travel in time, the question of how life originated on earth may never be answered. However, many ideas and beliefs have been proposed. Common to human cultures throughout history is the belief that life on Earth did not arise spontaneously, but was placed here by a creator."

But some parents complained Helphinstine spent little time during his roughly two weeks covering the actual textbook, a thick, hardcover book with pictures of red starfish and turquoise sea anemone on the front.

Part of Helphinstine's PowerPoint presentation, which lasted two days, traced the history of eugenics.

He said Sir Francis Galton, an English scientist who was a cousin of Charles Darwin, took eugenics and evolution and applied it to race. Specifically, Galton argued that a system of arranged marriages between men of distinction and women of wealth would eventually produce a gifted race.

Years later, Helphinstine said during his presentation, Adolf Hitler took some of those ideas to formulate the Nazi's racial policies.

"Hitler's government relied heavily upon Darwinism," the PowerPoint presentation read, referring to a 1988 American Scientist article. "As a result, a central policy of Hitler's administration was the development and implementation of policies designed to protect the 'superior race.' "

Later in the presentation, it reads, "The 'superior race' belief was based on the theory of group inequality within each species, a major presumption and requirement of Darwin's original 'survival of the fittest' theory."

To illustrate his point, Helphinstine included in his PowerPoint presentation pictures of Germany's gas chambers, fields of corpses and one slide that showed Charles Darwin next to the Nazi swastika.

In hindsight, Helphinstine said, he should not have shown those pictures to his class, since some of them were freshmen.

"I realize I made a mistake," he said. "Some of this was too heavy for these students. I should have waited until they were seniors.

"I could've done things differently," he added.

Board member Glen Lasken expressed frustration at Monday's meeting over how Helphinstine handled the class. "The teaching of our children is a sacred trust, and that trust was violated," Lasken said at the meeting.

Lasken said later at the meeting, "It doesn't matter that he never said the word 'God' in the classroom. If you eliminate one of two theories, you uphold the other one."

The larger issue

While Helphinstine maintains he never taught creationism, his firing brought the national firestorm over religion and science to Central Oregon's doorstep.

Nationally, President George Bush has advocated that schools teach intelligent design, a cousin to creationism, alongside evolution as competing theories.

A U.S. district judge ruled in 2005 that teaching intelligent design in public school biology classes is not science.

Intelligent design teaches that only an outside, intelligent cause can explain life's complexity instead of random mutation and natural selection, according to the Discovery Institute, a nonpartisan public policy think tank.

Some states, like Kansas, have taken on the issue for themselves. The Kansas School Board made evolutionary theory optional in the state's science education standards, according to news reports.

In Central Oregon, school officials said they knew of no other teacher fired for presenting creationism.

But in 2000, an assistant biology professor at Central Oregon Community College received about six complaints that prompted an informal investigation into his teaching, according to previous Bulletin reports.

Kevin Haley taught non-science majors biology at COCC for four years. But he came under informal investigation for complaints stemming from students and faculty that he taught creationism in the evolution segment of biology.

The district will soon start discussing how to prevent this situation from happening in the future, Gould, a board member said in an interview. They will try to hire a new biology teacher as soon as possible.

At this point, Helphinstine said he has no immediate plans, other than finding a job. He is not sure if wants to teach again.

"It's still important for kids to think," Helphinstine said. "It's the duty of teachers."

Christopher Stollar can be reached at 617-7818 or at cstollar@bendbulletin.com.

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