School Board's Pricer Gains Power, Critics : Antelope Valley: 'Family values' motivate panel's ex-president.

By PHIL SNEIDERMAN

Dec. 25, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

PALMDALE — The first time Billy A. Pricer went before the local school board to propose an idea he thought would strengthen the moral fiber of students, he was summarily dismissed.

The retired sheriff’s deputy turned minister and anti-gang activist told the board that students should be given random, voluntary urine tests for drugs. If the results came back clean, the students would be rewarded with discounts at movie theaters, bowling alleys and music stores. Those who tested positive would be offered drug counseling.

In a stinging 4-to-1 vote, the Antelope Valley Union High School District board shot down Pricer’s plan, citing concerns about the accuracy of drug tests and the impact on students who chose not to undergo testing.

That was five years ago.

“I was made to feel like an imbecile for even coming up there,” Pricer recalls bitterly. “It was embarrassing and humiliating to me.”

Pricer, now 52, didn’t just get angry, he got himself elected to the school board.

He recently finished a year as president of the very board that once rebuffed him. It was a year in which he made up for lost time.

Under his leadership, the board was the first in the state to refuse to administer the California Learning Assessment System test--better known as the CLAS test--because Pricer and other board members felt it promoted anti-family values. The action kicked off months of bitter statewide debate before the board was finally vindicated: Funding for the test has now been dropped.

Pricer also advocated the use of truancy sweeps in which deputies round up students who have ditched classes, then bring them to a counseling center that pays Pricer a salary.

Most recently he made it into the national news when he promoted a program that pays a $25 reward to any student who turns in a classmate who is in possession of drugs or weapons on campus.

All this has made Pricer for many in this high desert community a clear-thinking hero. To others he’s a bombastic ideologue. But one thing is for sure:

No one is dismissing Billy Pricer anymore.

“I represent this community,” says Pricer, who has another year left on his current school board term. “I believe in family values, moral values. They’ve been made to be dirty words. But what in the world is wrong with (those values)?”

For Pricer, a native Californian who serves as a pastor at the Lancaster church that came to national attention for producing anti-gay videos, his policies are just common sense.

“They call you a right-wing fundamentalist,” says Pricer of his critics. “I didn’t know I was a fundamentalist. I’d rather believe the decisions I make on the board come from a common-sense perspective. I’ve seen the basics work.

“It didn’t come from all of these experimental educational approaches.”

Some of his harshest critics are local teachers who say Pricer is trying to shape what is taught in local classrooms instead of just making district policy decisions.

“I think he overstepped the bounds of his role as president of the board of trustees,” says Kathleen Parks, an English teacher at Quartz Hill High School. “He is dictating issues of curriculum and administration of the school district and not allowing professional educators to do the job they were hired to do.”

Parks, who is a teachers union officer, also charges that Pricer is neglecting campus problems that are less likely to generate headlines.

“My classroom has not been swept for four weeks straight because they’re not hiring custodians,” Parks says. “But the board is distracted by dogmatic issues and political issues, and they’re not taking care of business. I have never had a board member in my classroom, watching students being taught. I don’t think they’re interested in that.”

Lancaster elementary school teacher Joanne Opdahl criticizes in particular Pricer’s student tipster plan. “I think there’s an absurdity that a student is going to do this for $25,” Opdahl says.

She believes his policies, in general, to be “intellectually shallow.”

“He provides what he sees as very simple solutions to very complex problems,” she says. “He seems to feel he has all the answers.”

But Pricer was the leading vote-getter in the 1991 school board election, and his support in this politically conservative area seems solid.

Doc Burch, an Antelope Valley businessman and Republican Party activist, considers Pricer his closest friend. “I like his policies, and I’m behind him 100%,” says Burch, who serves on the executive board of Pricer’s nonprofit counseling center. “He’s worked with youth. He’s worked with gangs. He’s a counselor. He’s a pastor.

“I don’t think I have an adequate vocabulary to express how much I appreciate and love him.”

Even some of his political opponents say they admire his administrative abilities. Shortly after Pricer was elected to the school board, an audit revealed the district’s budget deficit was $12 million, far more than had been estimated.

The board laid off more than 100 employees and made other spending cuts.

This year, Pricer announced that the district had returned to solvency. Charles Whiteside, who served on the school board from 1991 through 1993 and has opposed Pricer on the CLAS issue, says Pricer played a key role in the turnaround.

“He asked a lot of critical, probing questions regarding the district’s financial situation,” Whiteside says. “He provided critical leadership and support in implementing that fiscal recovery plan.”

Burch says that Pricer’s critics have wrongly labeled him an ideologue.

“This Christian right-winger (label) has been a media thing to bash people who have the ideas that we do,” Burch says. “We try to stick as close to the Constitution as it was framed by the Founding Fathers.”

Prominently displayed in Pricer’s office in his counseling center is a picture of him standing with Oliver North, who came to the Antelope Valley on a speaking appearance a couple of years ago. “He needed an armed escort from the airport because he’d received some threats on his life,” Pricer says.

“I thought he was a very articulate, interesting individual.”

The office bookshelf includes a volume called “Christian Counseling” and a book by Rush Limbaugh.

Pricer’s conservative outlook may spring in part from his traditional upbringing. He grew up in Blythe and Banning, moving to the Anaheim area as a teen-ager. His father was a telephone company supervisor, his mother a real estate broker.

Pricer, who stands about 5-foot-8 and appears to be quite fit, was not always a model student, particularly in elementary school, when he recalls being paddled occasionally for misbehavior.

“I think it helped keep me in line,” he says. “If my mother or dad heard I got whacked in school, I’d get whacked again at home.

“If some of my teachers knew I was a school board president, they’d probably roll over in their graves.”

After a stint in the Navy, he worked briefly for the phone company, then became a sheriff’s deputy, first in Orange County, then Los Angeles.

Pricer spent two years in narcotics work, getting a look at what he calls “the other side of the world.” He was promoted to sergeant and returned to street duty.

In 1975, while following up on a call about two men fighting outside an apartment building in Pico Rivera, he and two other deputies kicked in the door of an apartment where they thought the men might be hiding.

It was an ambush, Pricer says. When the deputies entered the apartment, they were attacked by 15 people Pricer says were gang members. He was hit in the head by a flying beer bottle that shattered his sunglasses and sent a fragment into his eye.

Lt. Tom Pigott, now commander of detectives at the Antelope Valley Sheriff’s Station, was one of the deputies who arrived to aid the deputies.

“As I recall, it was quite a donnybrook,” Pigott says. Pricer “was bleeding very heavily. We thought he had lost the eye. Obviously, he was injured, but he was responding and trying to defend himself as best he could.”

Pricer spent three weeks in the hospital with the eye injury, a fractured skull and broken ribs. He later retired from the department because of continuing problems with his eye, and he still receives disability pay.

During the next decade, he worked at camping resorts, ran restaurants and earned a master’s degree in psychology and counseling. In 1984 Pricer and his wife, Deborah, took jobs with the American Adventures Forest Lakes Resort, a recreational vehicle and tent camping center near the town of Lake Hughes in the Antelope Valley.

After moving to the area, Pricer began attending church at Antelope Valley Springs of Life in Lancaster and eventually become one of its associate pastors. The small church, located in an industrial area, came to national attention as the producer of “The Gay Agenda,” a widely distributed video that Pentagon officials and members of Congress used in opposing a move to allow openly gay men and lesbians to serve in the military.

Pricer says he was not involved in “The Gay Agenda” project but does not disagree with its message.

“I think the product is accurate,” he says. “They used professionals to give them opinion. They simply took footage of what was happening, and they explained it.” (A Times report on the video revealed that key statistics used in the tape were long ago discredited by the scientific community.)

In 1990, following the gang-related shooting death of an 18-year-old Antelope Valley High School athlete, Pricer set up a gang information hot line in his home. He later founded the nonprofit United Community Action Network to offer counseling for troubled teen-agers and their parents.

UCAN now sponsors “Wise-Talk,” a Scared Straight-type program in which parolees present vivid descriptions of prison life to teens who have had run-ins with the law. UCAN also sponsors baseball and basketball programs.

“If you’re going to take a gang away from a kid,” says Pricer, who earns a $42,000 annual salary as executive director of UCAN, “you have to provide an alternative.”

UCAN is funded by state, county and local grants, along with corporate and private donations. It has four paid employees, including Pricer and his wife. During fiscal 1992-93, its budget peaked at about $250,000. This year, Pricer says, the budget dropped to $180,000 because of a falloff in government and private aid.

The organization was particularly hard hit last summer when the city of Palmdale, which had been providing $25,000 annually to UCAN, cut its grant to $5,000.

Council members said it was part of a citywide belt-tightening. But Mayor Jim Ledford also said he was concerned about how UCAN was spending its money, pointing out that more than 50% of its budget was going to staff salaries. And some teachers and community leaders expressed concern about the close relationship between the high school district and UCAN.

“One of the things we’ve been watching real closely is the issue of the schools’ truancy program, and the Sheriff’s Department doing sweeps and then turning in all the students to UCAN,” says George Salas, president of Latinos for Social Justice. “I don’t know whether there’s any kind of a conflict or not, but it sure gives the appearance of one.”

Pricer flatly denies that any of UCAN’s funding is tied to the number of truants the group assists. “If I never took in another truant, it wouldn’t affect my budget at all,” he says.

With Pricer’s stint as school board president ended, some local leaders believe he has his sights set on running for Palmdale City Council or the state Assembly. Pricer declines to speculate on that, saying he hasn’t even decided whether he’ll run again for school board next year.

But he does say that he did not put forth his controversial programs in an attempt to make political gains for himself. The fame and infamy that has come to him, he maintains, is just a byproduct.

“I don’t know about the limelight,” Pricer says, “but I enjoy the challenge.”