Cerritos : School District Criticized

A Tustin man has criticized the ABC Unified School District for “wasting taxpayers’ money” to bus students to a recent George Bush campaign rally for president and using teachers to supervise them.

Ron Kobayashi told the Board of Education Tuesday that he believed it was unethical for the district to support a “partisan political campaign” by allowing the students and teachers to attend a campaign rally last Friday at Heritage Park in Cerritos.

Kobayashi, a 26-year-old jazz musician, said he was particularly upset to see “third- and fourth-graders marching and waving Bush-Quayle banners.”

Kobayashi asked the board to investigate who approved the students attending the rally and “if the board believes it was unethical reprimand the people.”

The board defended allowing the students to attend the event from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

The decision was made by teachers and principals with signed permission forms from parents, said board President Catherine Grant. “The activity was within board policy,” Grant said. The district saw the event as a field trip that allowed the students to get a firsthand civics lesson, Grant said.

“It was a field trip that was suppose to be educational in nature,” Assistant Supt. Charles Ledbetter said in an interview.

Ledbetter said more than 1,000 students participated and four buses were used.

The buses were used to transport more than 400 high school students from four different high schools civics classes. About 600 elementary school students walked to the park, Ledbetter said.

About 90 of them were from Cerritos Elementary School. These are the students that Kobayashi observed.

Ledbetter said: “It is my understanding that people handed out placards at the rally and the students took them. We called our lawyer and were told it was legal.”

Ledbetter said the district did turn down a request by the Bush campaign to have the Cerritos High School Band play at the rally. He said the district also refused a request by the Michael Dukakis campaign to pay for buses to take students to a Dukakis rally outside the district.