By Damien Fisher
Granite State News Collaborative
A controversial online school started by a polygamy proponent, Acellus Academy, was part of a million dollar grants program that benefited two New Hampshire schools.
Acellus, based in Kansas City, Missouri, was founded in 2001 by Roger Billings, a scientist and excommunicated member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Billings disagreed with his church over its teaching that bans the practice of polygamy and ended up leading a church of his own.
The program garnered notoriety as parents started complaining about racist and sexist content in some of the Acellus materials. Public school districts, the company claims 6,000, have started using Acellus as a remote learning option as the school year begins amid COVID-19 restrictions.
Grant Bosse, with the New Hampshire Department of Education, said Thursday that he does not believe any New Hampshire school district is using Acellus, though the state does not oversee what programs individual districts choose.
“Of course, some schools may be using this platform. They do not need to tell us which platform they have chosen,” Bosse said.
Thomas Bebbington, a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Manchester, said none of the New Hampshire diocesan Catholic schools are using Acellus as all of the Catholic schools in the state are starting in-person classes.
Amy Farkas with the New Hampshire homeschooling coalition said she has not heard of the Acellus Academy programs, and not heard it talked about among other homeschooling families.
“New Hampshire Homeschooling Coalition does not make recommendations about online (or any) curriculum/programs, but we do list curriculum and resources that our members have used and recommend on our website to be helpful,” Farkas said in an email.
The Acellus Academy programs do not appear on the NHHC list of recommended programs published online.
Acellus does have some ties to New Hampshire schools, though it is not clear the extent of the relationships. Acellus touts being part of a $1 million grant program funded by credit card company Discover. In 2014, Discover’s Pathway to Financial Success program pumped $10 million into providing financial literacy programs for high schools throughout the country. That included just shy of $1 million to bring the Acellus financial literacy class into 124 schools through remote learning.
Among the schools awarded grants for the financial literacy programs were White Mountain Regional High School and the PACE Career Academy, a public charter school in Allenstown. Jacob Hess, White Mountain’s principal said Thursday while the high school does teach financial literacy, he had never heard of the Discover grant, or Acellus.
“I’ve only been here five years,” Hess said.
Jennifer Cippola, PACE’s director of curriculum, also said she was unaware of the grant program. Cippola said the school does have a teacher for a personal finance class, but they do not use the Acellus program.
“I would be very interested in what would be available to us,” Cippola said.
Acellus representatives did not respond to a request for comment. It is not clear how much the grants given to the two New Hampshire schools were valued at, or if the schools accepted the grants when they were awarded in 2014. Matt Twonson, with Discover Financial Services, said the grant program allowed schools to select the courses they wanted to use.
“It was entirely up to the school, we felt teachers do know what their students need,” Towson said.
Acellus was one of several digital programs that received the grants when it was selected by the schools. Towson said the Acellus lesson plan used credible sources for its class. Discover ended the grant program in 2016, Towson said.
Acellus is the education wing of Billings’ International Academy of Science, a non profit that offers online education to more than 6,000 school districts, as well as homeschool curriculum. According to tax records, the non-profit brought in close to $10 million in revenue in 2017, the most recent year that the 990 for the International Academy of Science was made available.
Parents in California, Hawaii, and Illinois have complained about the Acellus program, according to a report in USA Today. One lesson for kindergartners implied African American families do not have fathers, and another lesson used a racist term for Arab people, according to the report.
According to the Utah-based Desert News, Billings left the Latter Day Saints church in the 1980s after becoming disillusioned with the church’s ban on polygamy. The church formally banned the practice in the 1890s in order to get Utah accepted as a state. Billings broke with the church and wrote an unpublished pamphlet to his family called, “The True Dream of Zion.” In that pamphlet Billings states that polygamy is sanctioned by God and prophets.
“Either polygamy was wrong and the church was never true, or Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were false prophets and the church was never true,” Billings wrote.
Billings would go on to lead an offshoot church, the Church of Jesus Christ in Zion. Billings has described the church The Pitch, an alternative newspaper in Kansas City, as an online “unchurch” with no physical location. Instead, members can sign up via email to hear broadcasts of sermons and lectures given from an underground bunker. Some of his lectures are “Tapping the Power of Heaven,” and “Hydrogen: Fuel of the Future.”
Billings is a scientist whose work with hydrogen-powered cars and other machines garnered attention early in his career. He later patented a network computing architecture that he claimed was stolen by Novell in a $220 million lawsuit. After years in court, the case ended when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington upheld the U.S. Patent Offices decision to invalidate Billings’ patent on the computer network system.
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