Letter from Our Founder
Bill Bowman, 1981.
Left to right: William Bowman, Tom Metcalf, Scott Jones, Fran Schoelen, Charlotte Jones; taken July 19, 2021 on Bill’s 90th birthday.
In the 1960s, the Catholic Church as well as Catholic schools underwent significant changes. As a result, dissatisfied Catholic parents removed their children from Catholic schools, thus actually causing some schools to close. In my own case, I never attended a Catholic school, but my two younger brothers did. As adults both lost their faith. Our first two children attended Catholic schools through the early 1970s, and both lost their faith as adults.
This was the reason why, on June 9, 1973, a group of concerned parents and I attended a presentation on the importance of preserving Catholic education. The meeting was at the home of Mrs. Helen Koutnik, who became a devoted member of the Our Lady of Victory staff. Impressed with the need to found a traditional Catholic school, we took the burden upon ourselves. It was proposed that I should be the first Director, while others agreed to help in finding a school location, desks, books, and teachers. And thus Our Lady of Victory School was born.
A series of “miracles” occurred: the school opened to 30 students in rented classrooms, taught by three retired Catholic school teachers with barely enough textbooks for the students. Yet over the next three years the school continued to grow and had to move twice to accommodate the increasing student body and faculty.
By 1977 it became obvious that we could not continue to find good teachers and obtain sufficient financial help at the rate of growth we were experiencing. The only solution that I could find would be to convert the school to a homeschool program. Since I could not find any traditional Catholic homeschool program offered in the United States, I started designing what I thought might develop into an acceptable program for Catholics. Our school was the first Roman Catholic homeschool program in the United States and maybe in the world. We finally closed the physical school on June 15, 1984 and replaced it completely with the very successful homeschool program. We have never regretted that important decision.
From 1977 the homeschool grew from less than 100 students to over 1,000 in 2002. Among those many students was our third child, who enrolled in OLVS, and as an adult still practices the True Faith.
In October 1991, Charlotte Jones, who had served as our Office Manager, and her family were going to move to Post Falls, Idaho. I asked her to become the Director and take the school operation with her so that I could concentrate on my own forensic handwriting analysis business. She, and now her son Scott, have done a very impressive job of making the school available to many thousands of students and families worldwide.
This homeschool program is very important today and serves a need for students living too far away from good Catholic schools. It is even more important in times such as these, suffering from mass Covid-19 fears and lockdowns. Parents can look to OLVS for the true religious training of their children and a solid foundation in reading, math, science, history and the many other subjects that will help their children grow into knowledgeable, respectable, and holy Catholic adults.
Helping to found and be involved in the initial growth of OLVS has been one of my most successful accomplishments. I must admit that I did not do this alone. We always had talented workers and supporters, both physically and financially. But our greatest supporter is and always will be Our Lady of Victory, who is and has been our guide and protector.