Redondo Beach Unlikely to Drop Disputed Books

Despite pressure from a coalition of parents who have joined a national campaign against a set of grade-school readers, it is unlikely that the books will be removed from the curriculum in Redondo Beach, the city’s school trustees say.

“This issue is really getting out of hand,� said Rebecca Sargent, president of the Redondo Beach City School District Board of Trustees. “If this board is asked to ban textbooks--well, that’s just not going to happen in Redondo Beach.�

Sargent’s reaction--echoed by a majority of the five-member board--came in the wake of a packed school board meeting last week, where members of the newly formed Coalition of Concerned Parents demanded the “Impressions� reading series be sent back to the publisher.

The demand, spearheaded by a group of parents from Hope Chapel, a local conservative Christian church, was the latest salvo in a national war on the textbooks that has been backed mostly by fundamentalist Christians and others. They say the stories in the books are violent and immoral.

Because the issue was scheduled on the agenda as an “information only� item, the board did not act on the request. However, TRW engineer John Ryan, spokesman for the coalition, said the group intends to force the matter to a vote and is circulating a petition demanding that the series be eliminated from Redondo Beach’s classrooms.

In an interview after the meeting, Bart Swanson, vice president of the board, noted that the books went through a thorough screening process before being accepted as the basal reading text in the city’s elementary schools. Part of that process, he and others added, was a period of several weeks this past spring when the books were made available to any parent for examination.

When parents in other school districts began to complain about the books earlier this school year, the trustees tried to preempt controversy in Redondo Beach by temporarily pulling the most highly criticized book--a fifth-grade reader--and replacing it for the first semester of the school year with another volume of the series by Holt, Rinehart & Winston of Canada Ltd., a subsidiary of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Now, Swanson and Sargent said, they are inclined to allow teachers to use the fifth-grade text during the second half of the year. The two said they have studied the book, and, despite a much-publicized poem in it about excreta-eating pigs, they found nothing in it to substantiate claims that its text teaches satanism or is immoral.

“I don’t care for this after-the-fact situation,� Swanson said.

Added Trustee Howard Huizing, “These stories are just a few pages out of a big work.�

To shelve the whole series, he said, “would be a hasty decision to make about hundreds and hundreds of pages of literature.�

Besides the poem on the excreta-eating pig, the fifth-grade reader contains another, “He’s Behind Yer,� about a monster that bites off a child’s head. A chapter on sorcery is included in the fourth-grade book.

The “Impressions� series has stirred a dispute in several California school districts, including the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District in the San Gabriel Valley, where it was dropped, and the East Whittier School District, where trustees were dismayed when the publisher sent the U.S. version of the series instead of the toned-down Canadian version.

Lawndale had also ordered the Canadian texts but received the U.S. versions for their fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade readers. Trustees decided that the fourth- and sixth-grade readers were acceptable, but fifth-graders there are using another text, pending state approval and receipt of the book’s Canadian version.

It is the U.S. version that is being used in Redondo Beach schools.

Ryan, who launched the local effort against the books only a few weeks ago, after hearing about the series’ problems in other districts, said he was not surprised at the reaction of Redondo Beach trustees.

“They’re right,� he said. “We should have looked over the books before they were approved. But parents sometimes just trust the school to do the right thing.�

Ryan added, however, that he is not discouraged by the trustees’ remarks.