School Decorations Are Christians’ Latest Issue : Parent Sees Satan in Halloween Images

Donna Voetee pulled her children out of school last week. The reason: Halloween decorations that, she said, smacked of Satanism.

“They have witches and black cats and goblins on the walls,” Voetee said. “My kids can’t sit under the altars of Baal. This witchcraft material is glorifying the devil.”

Beryl Brooks, the principal of Jane Addams Elementary School where Voetee’s two children--age 5 and 11--attended class, said she would consult district officials before deciding whether to change next year’s Halloween observance. “I never thought about it that way,” said Brooks, who has been an educator for 33 years. “I have always looked on Halloween as something children could enjoy.”

This week the holiday was over and the decorations are gone, but so were Voetee’s children. After spending a week with them at home, Voetee said she has decided to keep them there; She will teach them herself until the school changes its ways. “It was one battle after another,” Voetee said, referring to her months-long struggle with school district officials over major philosophical differences.

Filmstrip Outrage

It began in September when Voetee, a devout Christian, became outraged after her daughter saw a filmstrip with her fifth-grade class that the mother believes promotes witchcraft and occultism. It grew into a series of meetings between parents and the superintendent to discuss the filmstrip’s fate.

And now it has evolved into a full-fledged battle involving several outside Christian groups that are challenging some of the basic tenets of public education in Long Beach and threatening legal action to get their way.

The parents say the district is teaching “secular humanism,” a philosophy which, they say, emphasizes human rather than God-oriented values.

Secular humanism “is a religion,” said Rodney Guarneri, one of the parents. “They are showing their bias and I don’t think that’s proper.”

Said Harriet Williams, a member of the school board: “It’s not a religion, but a compromise. We don’t teach secular humanism in our schools--what we do is try to find a balance between all religions, and the compromise we sometimes reach is humanistic rather than Christian.”

It is an argument heard around the country these days as a growing number of Christian parents raise the specter of humanism to protest the curriculum used in their local schools. Though recent court decisions have upheld the responsibility of public schools to offer alternative educational experiences to those with religious objections, there has been no consensus on the definition of “secular humanism” or its status in public education.

To Meet With Parents

Supt. E. Tom Giugni said he plans to meet with the Long Beach parents Wednesday to announce his final decision regarding future use of the filmstrip that started the dispute. The film promotes a children’s mystery book called “The Headless Cupid.”

Following Voetee’s initial complaint, Giugni temporarily removed the film--which, among other things, deals with a young girl’s forays into the world of occultism--from use in the school district. He also removed another filmstrip deemed objectionable by the parents, a work called “Banner in the Sky,” which relates a young man’s attempt to surpass the mountain climbing abilities of his dead father, whose ghost figures prominently in the plot.

But in a 16-page brief, the district’s legal adviser--Theodore A. Buckley--has urged returning the films to use. Instead of preventing all students from viewing the materials, Buckley argued, the district should allow those students whose parents find the materials objectionable to “opt out” when they are shown.

“In seeking the permanent removal of the filmstrips,” Buckley wrote, “the parents are asking the school district to provide . . . a remedy which it may not constitutionally provide. To remove ‘The Headless Cupid’ . . . would directly contradict the requirements of the First Amendment.”

Giugni says he is inclined to follow Buckley’s advice, a position the parents say they find unacceptable. To help make their point, they recently contacted the Christian Civil Liberties Union--an Anaheim-based group--which sent a letter to Giugni threatening legal action should the filmstrips be reinstated.

‘Seductively Persuasive’

“The state simply cannot promote religious beliefs or value systems which indoctrinate children,” said David Llewellyn, a professor at Simon Greenleaf School of Law--a Christian-oriented institution in Orange County--and legal adviser to the Christian Civil Liberties Union. Because the “The Headless Cupid” presents occultism in a way that is “seductively persuasive to impressionable children,” he said, its use in a public school violates constitutional guarantees against the establishment of a state religion.

Other organizations have also stepped into the fray. Citizens for Excellence in Education, a national organization of Christian parents, has provided the Long Beach parents--several of whom are members--with advice and moral support. And Voetee and some other parents have joined Salt of the Earth, a local activist group of about 30 members founded by the late Clair E. Barnes. Barnes, who died last week, was a candidate for state Assembly in the 57th District who campaigned for a return to Biblical morality.

Voetee, in fact, is co-chairman of the organization’s Curriculum Materials Review Board, which acts as a sort of watchdog committee to protest materials deemed objectionable to Christians. The board’s first project was to focus on the two filmstrips.

And recently Voetee became secretary to another Salt of the Earth subgroup--called the American Certification Committee--with the more ambitious goal of becoming a national certifying agency for curriculum materials the group finds acceptable.

“Basically we base our philosophy on the Ten Commandments and the associated laws of the Scripture,” Barnes said in an interview the day before he suffered a heart attack and died. “Our purpose is to get Christians active outside their churches in all aspects of life, including the political arena.”

Certification Guidelines

Recently the certification committee drafted a set of guidelines which its members say they plan to use in deciding which school materials to certify. The guidelines include requirements that the materials elevate students’ attitudes on patriotism and traditional moral standards; that it not encourage situational ethics or examining values; that it not emphasize attitudes and feelings as opposed to academics; and that it not deal with rock music, boy-girl relationships, dream analysis, meditation or “self-pleasure as the ultimate authority.”

Barnes’ death, while a setback, will not significantly alter the American Certification Committee’s work, its members say. “I know Clair had good people lined up,” Voetee said, “and they’ll just step in.”

In an Oct. 13 letter to Giugni, Voetee called the two filmstrips “the tip of the iceberg” and pressed the district to explain its alleged adoption of “secular humanism” in public school classrooms.

In a recent interview, she cited several examples. One of them involved a 10th-grade nutrition class which, Voetee said, was given a test asking the students to rate their feelings on 16 items ranging from “throwing a rock through a window, to abortion on demand to burning the flag.” Another involved her 5-year-old son who, she said, brought home a paper examining family values and encouraging role playing as a means of exploring those values.

“That’s humanism,” Voetee said. “They’re trying to get the kids to talk about their feelings. They’re trying to get them not to hold to the values of their parents or their church, but to choose their own values,” a process which Voetee believes undermines Christian teachings that values are absolute. “Humanism promotes self-exploration,” she said. “That’s an invasion of privacy.”

World of Diversity

School officials do not deny that materials and exercises such as those described are used by district teachers. But their purpose, said board member Williams, is not to impose or change values as much as it is to prepare children to live in a world of diverse values.

“In a diverse society,” she said, “we try to teach respect for that diversity. I don’t know who has made values clarification a dirty word. I think it’s teaching kids to think--to see both sides of an issue and then to answer the whys.”

Rather than promote secular humanism or any other “-ism,” school officials say, district teachers attempt to treat controversial subjects with fairness and balance. “I have the responsibility of teaching my children the values that we believe in at home,” said Bill Marmion, director of curriculum and instructional resources. “But I don’t expect my children’s teachers to teach them only those values. Teachers are very sensitive to diverse values. We don’t teach communism, but we teach about communism. We don’t teach religion, but we teach about religion.”

Voetee and her associates say they aren’t satisfied with such explanations, and plan to continue their fight for the kind of public education they envision. While some carefully couch their position in legal arguments stressing the belief that constitutional guarantees of separation of church and state are being violated by the teaching of secular humanism, which they consider a religion, others see the matter far more simply: as a basic conflict between true and false religions.

“Ultimately, of course, I would like to have the God of the Bible glorified in our schools,” Voetee admits. “(Let’s) go back to the origins of American education. Kids used to learn to read out of the Bible.”

Says Guarneri: “What’s happening now is a raising of consciousness.”