Employees at J.R. Blackmore and Sons in Kitchener, British Columbia, work preparing fence posts on Monday, April 28, 2008. The company is owned by Winston Blackmore, the self-professed polygamist, who is the leader of one of two groups associated with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that live in the region around Creston, British Columbia. (AP Photo/Joe Sales)

LISTER, British Columbia — Fluorescent lights cast a yellow-green pall on the posted student artwork. Children’s voices recite lessons behind closed doors. A group of seventh-grade girls giggle and whisper as they wander back to class.

But instead of a smiling portrait of an elected official, Bountiful Elementary-Secondary School displays a photograph of a smiling Warren Jeffs — the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, who is doing time in a Utah prison, convicted of being an accomplice to rape.

The principal puts an affectionate arm around a youthful and happy second-grade teacher, a mother of 12. She’s one of his wives.

The students and the teachers are dressed in hand-sewn clothes, mostly cut from the same few bolts of pastel fabric. The girls wear their hair in long, elaborate French braids, some with exaggerated pompadours above their foreheads.