Conservative Parents Speak Out in Moorpark : Education: The activists are having an effect on local policy. Latest battle involved four books on students' reading list.

By JAMES MAIELLA JR

Jan. 30, 1994 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

The issue was whether the Moorpark Unified School District should continue to recommend that 11th-graders read four Jean Auel novels some said are sexually explicit and offensive.

The setting was a marathon meeting of the Moorpark school board.

And standing behind the speaker’s podium, again representing her religious and conservative ideals and an increasingly vocal constituency, was Moorpark resident Helen Taylor.

“I felt strongly that I needed to stand up for what I believe in,” said Taylor, a community activist and failed mayoral and school board candidate. “I was shocked when I found out that books that had that kind of content were on the recommended reading list.”

In the end, the school board early Wednesday voted 4 to 1 to keep the books on the list.

But in a concession aimed at dissenting board member Tom Baldwin and the vocal contingent that objected to the books, the board agreed that parents should be provided a synopsis of every title on the reading list and that the document itself should include a warning telling parents that some of the books may contain “adult” material.

District officials say the battle over “Clan of the Cave Bear” and other Auel books, as well as the end result, are indicative of a growing activism among religious conservatives in Moorpark and the slow but steady effect they are having on local policy.

“I think that we’re being slowly pushed to the right,” said Baldwin, a board member with strong religious beliefs who labels himself politically left of center.

“So far, though, I haven’t felt that we’ve been pushed anywhere that we shouldn’t be. In every way that the members of Moorpark’s conservative community have influenced the school district, I feel they’ve influenced it for the better.”

Baldwin and board members who consider themselves even more liberal agree that conservative parents have a right to try to shape district policy.

“I don’t see anything wrong with the fact that conservative groups are organizing and petitioning the school board for what they feel are issues and actions in the best interests of their children,” said board member Clint Harper, a liberal Democrat.

“Although I don’t agree with them all the time, my feeling as a school board member is that we have to embrace them rather than fight them. We need to bring them into the process,” Harper said. “They have to be active participants accepted within the system.”

An increasing number of Moorpark conservatives are demanding that they be recognized as active participants with valid points of view, particularly in relation to school issues.

“This community is filled with young families who are very interested in their children, and I think a growing number of them are fed up with a school district that doesn’t care about their views,” said Errol Hale, pastor of Shiloh Community Church and an outspoken Moorpark conservative.

“My feeling is that the books aren’t the issue,” Hale said. “It’s a philosophical difference between a district administration and teachers who will stand up all night long to justify the use of books that parents don’t want recommended to their children.”

Frank DePasquale, the district’s assistant superintendent for instruction, rejected the criticism, saying educators have taken conservative views into account and will continue to do so.

In addition to winning some concessions on the Auel decision, DePasquale said conservative opinion helped shape an abstinence-based sex-education curriculum adopted by the district last year.

“The conservative voices on the Growth and Development Committee did have an impact on our curriculum,” DePasquale said. “It’s a very restrictive curriculum.”

Taylor, who served on the advisory committee, said she supported its desire to stress abstinence but still objects to a recommendation to include some sex education as early as kindergarten.

“I fought long and hard to get it out of the early elementary grades,” she said. “That was my biggest complaint.”

As in the case of the Auel decision, however, Moorpark conservatives are not walking away from such battles empty-handed.

“I think what we’re seeing now is that the conservative majority that has existed for many years, not just in Moorpark but in Simi Valley as well, is really asserting our own rights,” said Moorpark Councilman Scott Montgomery, the council’s staunchest conservative.

“In many ways, they’ve been trampled over the years.”

Still, conservatives say they are made to feel like outcasts when approaching teachers or administrators with concerns, and even some school officials concede that the district must do a better job dealing with the now-vocal contingent.

“What I see happening in our district, unfortunately, is that the people who run the district--the school board and the administration--very often see groups like the ones we’re seeing organized as a threat,” Harper said. “They put up this line of defense. I see it as fundamental to education that you allow a wide variety of opinions and views. If educators can’t embrace a wide range of philosophies, who can?”

Taylor said the five-hour hearing on the Auel books evidenced how conservative thought is sometimes received in Moorpark. During the stormy, often-bitter session, critics of Auel’s work were accused of supporting repression and censorship.

“They label people who come out and say, ‘I don’t want books on the recommended reading list that give detailed descriptions of oral sex’ right wing,” Taylor said. “They consider the Ku Klux Klan right wing and then consider parents who don’t want a certain book on the reading list right wing and it just seems like there should be a dividing line at some point.”

For her part, Taylor said she and her fellow conservatives will continue to pick their battles where they see them, taking advantage of opportunities to bring Moorpark school philosophies more in line with their own.

“We’ll just take it as it comes,” Taylor said. “Usually conservatives, they’re more quiet. A lot of time they don’t make a big scene and they don’t have a loud voice. I think that people are feeling the need to join together and preserve our values, our conservative ideals, because they’re under attack.”