GIHS student has local impact on Creation Science movement

by Kathy Duff
Grand Island Dispatch, November 3, 2006

Brittany Stallard

Sixteen-year-old Brittany Stallard has caught a vision for her future by looking at the past. The 11th grader at Grand Island High School has become very interested in working as an adult with an organization called Answers in Genesis. Her involvement stems from the disparity she observed over what has been taught to her in the public school setting regarding the origins of the Earth and what she learned for many years as she and her mother, Phyllis, explored the topic during many years of home schooling.

“When Brittany entered public school … she was very challenged in history and science classes about how much evolution is taught as fact, not theory,” Phyllis Stallard explains. Brittany felt compelled to speak to school administrators about her right to talk respectfully but openly in a class of “Intelligent Design,” and of ideas of the Earth being thousands, rather than billions of years old.

“There is science to back up what is written in the Bible regarding how the Earth was created and how old it is,” Brittany maintains. Both she and her mother stress that the theory of evolution mandated in the public school curriculum is just that – a theory – and that there are many people who believe that well-thought-out ideas of intelligent design and a young Earth should be given at least equal weight.

Brittany and her mother wrote a short article on the intelligent design class for the Buffalo News, and it was read by people interested in bringing nationally acclaimed creation scientist William Hoesch to the Buffalo area earlier this month. As a result, they both served in a group called the Greater Buffalo Creation Science Committee, and Brittany acted as emcee for William Hoesch’s lecture to the high school youth group at The Chapel at Cross Point in Getzville.

Brittany says she wants to continue to be a voice for creation science through her high school years and beyond. She is enthusiastic about a new creation science museum opening in 2007 in Ohio and may pursue the field as a career.