Tucson ‘church school’ used as tool to instill fear, shame in students

Levi Dueñas said he was in 3rd grade, sitting inside a closet in his Tucson church. He remembers listening through the door as his teacher and fellow students made fun of him. 

“‘That’s what he gets,’” Dueñas remembers overhearing the teacher tell the class that day in the mid-2000s. He heard students laughing and making jokes about him.

"You feel like a dunce. You feel like an idiot. You feel very very small," Dueñas said.

Whenever Dueñas talked too much in class, he said, his teacher would push his desk into the closet and make him stay in there for anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours. Talking was against the rules. 

Students were to be stoic and reverent like in church services at the Golden Dawn Tabernacle, Dueñas’s older sister, Zoe Cordova said. She used to be a teacher at the church-run school before leaving the church. She said students were barely allowed to talk, aside from morning greetings or answers to teacher’s questions.

Shame and humiliation for rule-breaking is a common occurrence in both the school and the church, which is known as the Golden Dawn Tabernacle although its original and formal name is Tabernaculo Emanuel. Twenty former members have described the church as a “cult.” Congregants are shunned for breaking church rules such as the strict dress code or prohibitions on internet and travel, former members said.

Sometimes the pastor, Isaac Noriega, publicly shames rule-breakers from the pulpit to keep them in line, former members said. The “church school” is an extension of that control.

Noriega said he has never named anyone from the pulpit in that way. But former members say the church community knows who is being condemned even if Noriega doesn't utter their name.

"That’s how (Noriega) creates his kingdom, through humiliation," Cordova said. "You don’t want to be shunned. So you do whatever he tells you."

Tucson church a controlling 'cult within a cult,' ex-members say

School in a gray area

The church school operates in a gray area between a private school and a home school.

Church parents sign affidavits with the county stating they intend to homeschool their children, according to accounts from former congregants and affidavits obtained by the Arizona Daily Star and Lee Enterprises Public Service Journalism Team. But parents then bring their children to the church where other congregants teach the children their Abeka Christian Homeschool curriculum.

The students attend the unaccredited school Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., according to parent JoAnn Malena, who recently left the church, and former student Kimberly Garrido. 

“(Church leaders) would say that your parents are supposed to be teaching you at home, and the teachers are just tutoring you, but no one did that,” Garrido said. “Because the church school was considered school, and that’s where you learned.”

Noriega said in an interview that some describe the program as “school” but “it’s where we tutor the children.” He said there are about 100 children ages 5 to 18 in the program, who “get their diploma and go to college.” He said he doesn’t want to make the tutoring program a private school because he doesn't want parents to have to pay for it.

Dave Wells, research director at the Grand Canyon Institute, a nonpartisan think-tank, said Golden Dawn’s educational program sounds similar to a “micro-school.” He described such groups as “quasi-homeschool” environments where an online entity like Abeka provides the curriculum and an adult, maybe a parent, helps a small group of students complete their schoolwork at a parent's house or another setting.

Wells said there’s nothing illegal about that kind of setup. But he said the Grand Canyon Institute is calling for “a lot more oversight” of these smaller educational groups and private schools.

“It’s the parent's option to choose how their children are going to be educated,” Wells said. “As a consequence, Arizona has a lot of flexibility towards education, but there’s also a lack of transparency and accountability.”

Malena said even though parents have school choice in Arizona, "the church made the choice for us." 

John Calvo, a former congregant who now runs a research website on abuses of power at Golden Dawn, explained it this way: 

“Over the last couple of decades, they've just gotten more and more strict where they really, really pressure folks, the parents, to send their kids to the church school. My opinion is that they want to isolate the children from the moment they're born so that they are not exposed at all to any external communities that are outside of the church’s control.”

Concerns over quality

There is a religious spin to the curriculum. Noriega said the students are not taught the theory of evolution or sex education. 

In writing projects from around 2013 obtained by Lee Enterprises and the Arizona Daily Star, the children wrote that Noriega is a “true hero,” “mighty warrior,” “person so brave and true” and “a faithful and loving pastor” who “preaches powerful sermons to us every Wednesday and Sunday to show us the one true way.”

“It’s just an indoctrination school,” Cordova said.

The students don't use the internet, a practice that is part of their faith at Golden Dawn, Noriega said. 

Dueñas and Garrido said their book reports and writing assignments had to be about something religious: their pastor’s messages, the Bible, the lives of church leaders or the recorded sermons of their prophet, the late Rev. William Branham.

Branham was a faith healer who gained international fame in the 1950s. According to one estimate from an organization called Voice of God Recordings, Branham has millions of followers worldwide today who subscribe to the ministry he started, called "The Message," or "The Message of the Hour." Branham preached that the pastor should be the sole person in charge of his congregations, which has caused some churches, including Golden Dawn, to become extreme, a Lee Enterprises and Arizona Daily Star investigation found. 

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The church school has been used not only to teach students about their faith but also to keep them within the isolated Golden Dawn community, former members say.

Dubious diplomas, uncertified teachers, a lack of accreditation and poor record-keeping make it challenging for students to prepare for college or get jobs outside of the construction businesses owned by church members.

Most of the teachers are young, single women from church with no formal teaching training, Garrido said.

Former Golden Dawn student Aaron Dueñas, who is Cordova and Levi's brother, said the diploma he got from the church school prevented him from getting into the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. He would have been eligible for the program if he could have proven that he had been attending school and graduated high school, but he couldn't because of his worthless diploma. 

Levi Dueñas only went up to the 10th grade. He got a diploma, but it wasn’t equivalent to a high school diploma so he had to take a separate test to earn his GED. He said as long as you “know how to read and write and do math,” getting an education doesn’t really matter in the church community because “you’re going to work construction anyways.”

'No one cared'

One woman, who asked to have her identity shielded to prevent conflict with her family, said the church school teachers were more focused on making sure she was doing well with cooking and sewing in her “homemaking classes” than on her other schoolwork.

“As a girl, there’s more pressure because we’re taught from a young age that we’re not worth much, that our only purpose is to become wives and mothers,” she said. “We shouldn’t be good at anything else. We shouldn’t have ambitions or goals. You knew from a young age you would never have a job or get a higher education.”

Noriega said there are women in his church who have jobs: one works for the court, one works for a local lawyer, another works for Pima College and another is a dietitian. But those are the exceptions; most church women are homemakers, Garrido, Cordova, Calvo and other former members said.

The anonymous woman said teachers didn’t notice when she fell behind in her 7th-grade classes. There were no benchmarks or standardized tests to keep track of how she was doing, she said.

“I’m sitting there, and I don’t understand anything,” she said, her voice shaking. “I felt so stupid and so lost. And no one cared.”

The church school also doesn't keep track of students' grades, Malena said. Malena’s son had no transcript and “no credit history at all of his education,” she said.

When her son decided to leave the church community, the lack of records made it challenging to get him into public school, Malena said. A public high school tested him to determine his grade level, and he was able to enter 10th grade after completing summer school. Her son is now earning credits for his classes.

Despite problems, Levi Dueñas said the Abeka curriculum is “actually an excellent program.” Cordova said she respects the teachers because "they don't get paid hardly anything and they do a hell of a job."

“The kids are very advanced,” Cordova said. “The kids learn very good math. Their spelling is perfect. Their handwriting is beautiful. I do have to give to them.

“But the dark side of it is the control and the fear the kids are constantly under.”

‘It was humiliating’

Malena said church leaders used the school to control her and punish her daughter as Malena went through a divorce from a man still in the church. 

In late 2023, a judge ruled that Malena could pick up her daughter from the school for Malena’s weekends with her. But the church threatened to kick Malena’s daughter out of the program if Malena came onto the church’s property, Malena said.

Malena said she agreed to get her daughter a day later — even though that meant less time with her — so the pickup didn't have to be at the school. She didn't want her daughter to be forced to leave the only community she's ever known.

Several years prior, while Malena was still attending the church, the school punished her daughter for Malena’s actions. Malena said she argued with the principal, Rey Aguirre, over lies that were being told about her daughter.

Shortly after the confrontation, teachers made her daughter sit out in the hallway to do her schoolwork, Malena said.

Girls were often shamed at school if their clothes were deemed too "promiscuous" — which could be a skirt that showed the ankles or a shirt that showed the upper arm, Cordova said. 

“That’s one of the worst punishments,” Cordova said. “If the girl is wearing something that Rey Aguirre or his daughter don’t approve of, they get sent home. And it’s very humiliating for the girls.”

Levi Dueñas said he saw girls get kicked out of the church school for days after getting caught wearing makeup, something Branham preached against.

Another incident of public humiliation happened to Dueñas when he was in 7th grade. 

Dueñas said his job was to make sure the front door was closed after everyone arrived at school. Noriega came to the school and yelled at him — a 7th grader — for being by the door instead of in class, Dueñas said. Noriega said he doesn’t remember this incident and has only visited the school twice.

“(Noriega) just tears into me,” Dueñas said. “There was literally a classroom full of kids right there. … It was humiliating. It was pretty bad. The shock is usually what gets you, like ‘What did I even do wrong?’

“It’s just this constant fear.”