Bradenton Christian School Celebrates 50 Years In Community

The events planned for the Bradenton Christian School 50th anniversary celebration this Friday and Saturday sound like a family reunion with dinners, games and music, and in many ways it will be.

Many of the students are children and grandchildren of former students who attended the school in the 1960s and 1970s.

“Going to a Christian school was just a natural part of family life,” said Frank Hiskes, who went to Bradenton Christian in the 1960s. “Most of our parents went to Christian schools.”

These young parents at the time are now the grandparents who still volunteer and help made Bradenton Christian a community institution in Manatee County.

The celebrations kick off at 1 p.m. Friday with the annual golf tournament, itself celebrating 40 years. The varsity baseball team will play Bishop Timon-St. Jude High School at 4 p.m.

At 7 p.m. there will be an alumni and past/present faculty mixer in Wichers Auditorium.

Saturday will be just as packed, with family-oriented activities starting at 7:30 a.m. with the Panther Prowl 5K race and 1K fun run.

There will be a barbeque dinner, a student performance, art exhibit and dessert between 4:30 p.m. and 6:45 p.m.

Then at 6:45 p.m., attendees will be taken down memory lane with a production of “BCS — This Is Your Life.”

That history was built on faith, commitment, and hard work.

The early days

It all started in 1957 when 12 families, all members of the Bradenton Christian Reformed Church, 4208 26th St. W., met to discuss the feasibility of establishing a Christian school for their growing families.

The Christian Reformed Church has a tradition of extending the Christian education from the home into the school to serve the child all through life.

“We come from a background where the parent should be responsible for education, not the state,” said Will Wichers, who with his wife, Dina, was one of the core group of founding families.

During the three years between the first meeting and the opening of the school in the fall of 1960, the group adopted a constitution for the School Society and School Board to develop a plan for the school.

Jack Doornbos, from Zeeland, Mich., was hired as the first principal, and Myrna Wieberdink as the first teacher.

There were 24 students registered from 12 families in grades 1-5 and classes were held at Bradenton Christian Reformed Church.

In each of the next three years an additional grade was added, and the first eighth-grade class of four students graduated in 1964.

Caren Bandstra Traynor was one of those graduates.

Her parents, Bernie and Pearl Bandstra, were one of the founding families, and her mother was the sister of Will Wichers and Thomas Wichers, who with his wife, Carol, also were founders.

Traynor’s recollection of her first day at Bradenton Christian was one of excitement.

“We had new desks and new books,” she said. “And I knew all the kids.”

Traynor started as a fifth-grader in the new school when it opened in 1960, having previously gone to Ballard Elementary School.

She remembers Bradenton as a different place back in the 1960s.

“It was a pretty Christian-oriented city,” Traynor said. “At Ballard, we said prayers before class and even had this dentist come in on Wednesday to tell Bible stories.”

But her parents and the others wanted more control over their children’s education.

“The public schools were very good,” said Carol Wichers, “but we wanted our children to have a Christian education.”

Family tradition

Carol Wichers and her husband, Thomas, who died in 1981, sent all six of their children to BCS.

Just like the Bandstras and other Wichers families, Carol and Thomas Wichers have grandchildren and even great-grandchildren attending the school.

Arlene Wichers Geraldson, the daughter of Carol and Thomas Wichers, graduated from the eighth grade — the school's highest at the time — but her daughter, Anna Geraldson McSwain, went through all 12 grades at the school, as did Anna’s younger siblings, Steffen, Jocelyn and Sarah.

“It was hard financially,” said Arlene Geraldson, “but mother always said we were investing in our children."

Now Anna and her husband, Gill McSwain, who also graduated from Bradenton Christian, are sending their 5-year-old, Abigail, to the school and plan on enrolling their 2-year-old, Madelyn.

Just as it was a struggle for Arlene Geraldson’s generation, her parent’s generation also had to sacrifice to send their children to the new school they just organized.

“We were all working two jobs,” said Don Bouwer, who with his wife, Marilyn, joined with the other 11 families to help organize the school.

“With a Christian education every subject is taught with religion,” said Marilyn Bouwer.

The Bowers sent their six children and a foster child to Bradenton Christian.

When their second oldest, Dave Bouwer, went to BCS it only offered classes to the eighth grade. He then went on to Manatee High School.

But it is the years at Bradenton Christian that are the more meaningful, Bouwer said.

“Most of our friends were from the church,” he said. “To this day we're still close — we know each other’s families.”

Friendly atmosphere

Two of Bouwer's classmates, Frank Hiskes and Roger Deckinga, agreed that friendships made at Bradenton Christian remained stronger than those from Manatee High School.

“We all knew each other from the neighborhood,” said Hiskes.

The church provided the family atmosphere where they learned about friendships, he said.

“Frank was the first guy I met when I moved to Florida,” said Deckinga, who came to Bradenton when he was 13 from Chicago, where he attended a Christian school.

Lois Van Beek, one of the about 40 teachers now at the school, probably taught some of the Bandstra, Wichers and Bouwer children. She's been at BCS for more than 40 years.

Van Beek came to Bradenton thinking she would stay only a couple years and move on to see another part of the United States.

“It was quite a change,” Van Beek said. “I came from teaching at an established Christian school in Michigan to this new school.”

She said the school she left had closets and blackboard, but the classrooms at the church were used as Sunday School rooms, and every Monday the teachers had to set up their classrooms again.

“I just took it in stride and pitched in where needed,” she said. “We all just rolled up our sleeves and got to work.”

The move to the new building on 20 acres on 43rd Street West in 1972 reinforced Van Beek’s that Bradenton Christian was dedicated to a quality education.

And the growth of the campus continued through the years, with an addition to the elementary school, the construction of a gymnasium, middle and high schools and a fine arts and media building, along with several sports fields.

“It was an amazing journey,” said Van Beek, “ but in all that we never lost sight of the focus of the school — to provide a Christian education to support the home.”

Through the years Bradenton Christian has earned a reputation of fielding winning sports teams, and Van Beek helped the school reach that status. She coached the first girls’ basketball team at BCS and helped develop them into the state champions they became.

Girls did not always have opportunities to excel in sports at the school.

Debbie Thomas said when she went to Bradenton Christian in the 1970s she loved to play soccer, but there was only a boys team. The coach at the time, Al Schipper, encouraged her and four other girls to tryout for the boys team, Thomas said.

“By the end of the week it was down to only two of us,” she said, “We stuck it out until the last practice before the first game when the other girl had a big problem with transportation.

“It was down to me, and no way was I going to quit,” said Thomas, as she recalled those days with a smile.

She said she spent much of the time on the team sitting on the bench, but a group of dads were her cheerleaders and would yell at the coach to put her in the game, and he did when they were winning big.

After Thomas graduated from Bradenton Christian she went off to Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., where she earned a degree in business and then one in education. She eventually returned home to Bradenton and secured a teaching position at the school she attended as a child.

Thomas has been at BCS for 20 years and has been the media specialist for the past seven. To her, Bradenton Christian is like a family.

“The teachers feel they’re parenting, and the Bible instructs parents to raise their children up in the Lord,” Thomas said.

It is the teachers that junior Josh Clark, 17, likes about being a student at Bradenton Christian.

“There’s a real bonding with the other students,” said the mostly straight-A student and member of the Panthers football team, “but also the teachers.

“In public schools you know your teachers,” Clark said, “but here they can be your friend.”

He said his experiences with teams from public schools have been good.

“They see us as just another school and part of the community,” Clark said. “They see we are different by the way we act at games, but it’s not the only way we’re viewed.”

From the original 24 in five grades, the school has grown to almost 600 students enrolled in preschool classes through 12th grade.

School Superintendent Dan van der Kooy called Bradenton Christian’s achievements a blessing.

It was through the work of many people that the school succeeded, said van der Kooy, who came to the school 20 years ago, first as the secondary school principal before taking the superintendent position in 2004.

“They were all on the same page,” he said, “to provide a Christ-centered education to the children.

“Christianity underlies everything we are,” van der Kooy said. “It’s part of our DNA.”