Schoolbook Poems Are Too Dark for Protesting Parents : Education: Tales of flesh-eating monsters are opposed. Some defend the disputed books as an inducement to pupils to read more.

Poems about monsters that bite children’s heads off and underwater pigs that eat excrement have raised concern among some parents in the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District

They say the selections--included in a series of Canadian reading books used throughout the district--are morbid and promote devil worship. Unless the books are removed from the curriculum, the parents are threatening to picket the school district.

“We’re not shouting Satanism, Satanism, but some of these poems are about darkness and eating flesh and I don’t think it’s appropriate for young children,” said Martha Bezotte, one of about 150 concerned parents.

The district has 22,295 students in the communities of La Puente, Hacienda Heights, Industry and Valinda.

School officials contend the series, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston of Canada Ltd. and used for the first time this school year in first through sixth grades, stimulates reading by using literature-based images.

“There are some selections that are questionable,” said Irv Rem, assistant superintendent for instructional services. But he disputed that the entire series, called “Impressions,” is tainted and morbid, adding that the protests have been mounted by “a group of basically fundamentalist parents who have made an assumption about dark side, Satanism . . . all of that.”

The district has agreed to pull the texts while it completes its own evaluation of the books, for which it paid $378,000. Rem says the school board will meet today to discuss evaluations and possible options.

But the parents aren’t mollified. Worried that children could read objectionable stories on their own if the board merely omits certain poems from the curriculum, they want the entire series banned.

Otherwise, parents warn that they will yank their children from class one day next week and picket the district office.

Some of the more morbid selections were expunged in a new edition currently distributed in Canada, where the series is widely used. Gruesome artwork also has been toned down, said Liz Stephens, manager of marketing support for Holt, Rinehart in Toronto.

“We thought it was a little bit, well, dark,” said Stephens, who added that the selections were changed after Canadian educators criticized certain poems as morbid.

Rem said Friday that officials of the Hacienda La Puente District who screened the books had noticed problems with some selections in the third and fifth grade books, which have been the focus of most of the controversy.

The district thought it was getting revised versions for those grades, but was sent the originals, he said. One option the board might consider is buying the revised books for third and fifth grades, which would cost an additional $52,000, he said.

Even the parents most vociferously opposed to the series concede many of the selections are innocuous. Included are excerpts such as Walter Farley’s “The Black Stallion,” a beloved character in children’s literature.

But parents are up in arms about selections like “He’s Behind Yer!” by Robert McGough, which has been purged from the new edition:

‘He’s behind yer!’

Chorused the children

But the warning came too late.

The monster leaped forward

And fastening its teeth into his neck,

Tore off the head.

The body fell to the floor

‘More’ cried the children

‘More, More, More.’

“It’s just outrageous,” said Barbara Karr, one of the organizers of the parental protest. “As parents we can monitor what kids see on TV or what books we allow them to read but then they go into . . . a public classroom and are taught this.”

Not all of those protesting are Christians worried about Satanic imagery, Karr adds, maintaining that her group also includes Jewish and Buddhist parents.

Of course, the macabre has a long tradition in children’s literature. Fairy tales are full of witches who stuff children in ovens and wolves with appetites for little girls. The Grimm fairy tales, inspired by Teutonic folk tales first anthologized by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm in 1812, are known for their violence.

But some children’s experts say such tales play an important role in development. Noted child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim has argued that children find release in seeing their fears about scary monsters externalized and then resolved.

“We don’t want to go back to ‘Dick and Jane’ because children won’t pay attention to that, it doesn’t reflect the world as they see it,” says Irene Goldenberg, a family psychologist with UCLA’s psychiatry department.

After hearing several of the poems to which parents object, Goldenberg said that “they are powerful images that have some literary value and can be discussed. I don’t think they in themselves are frightening. For normal, healthy kids, it’s fine.”

But parents say they have mustered their own child psychologists and education consultants who say the imagery is inappropriate for children.

“There are several stories that have themes of abandonment, physical injury and kidnaping and cruelty to animals,” said Fullerton child therapist Rosemary Chiaferi. “They’re gloomy and they present a sense of hopelessness about the world . . . that (does) not culminate in adequate or reassuring resolution.”

Some parents were also surprised to learn that part of the series had not been fully approved by the state Board of Education.

Only texts for grades one through three are on the state-approved list, according to William L. Rukeyser, a special assistant to Bill Honig, state superintendent of public instruction. Texts for grades four through six have received legal approval, which means they have been screened for discriminatory overtones, but have not yet been evaluated for educational content, Rukeyser said.

In California, however, school districts are not required to use state-approved educational materials exclusively. Seventy percent of district budgets for such materials must be spent on state-approved books; the balance is up to the district’s discretion.

Nonetheless, Rukeyser defended the ideas behind the books. “We’re pushing text manufacturers to include material from real literature . . . rather than incredibly dull, drab textbook prose written by committee,” he said.

People for the American Way, a Washington-based nonprofit group founded by television producer Norman Lear, which has been following the “Impressions” controversy for several years in other states, said the series awakens in children a love of reading.

In Gig Harbor and Oak Harbor, two small coastal communities in Washington state where the “Impressions” series is used, “they’ve had a wonderful response. Kids who didn’t read at all before . . . now they can’t wait to read,” said Donna Hulsizer, a spokeswoman for People for the American Way.

The group, which tracks censorship issues in public schools, says a district in Troutdale, Ore., was considering buying the reading series but backed down to avoid controversy.

“What starts out as a couple of parents concerned about their kids turns into a censorship crusade,” Hulsizer noted.

But for some parents, the issue boils down to one of values and beliefs. Denise Hill says she plans to take her 8-year-old daughter Daphne out of school unless the texts are removed.

She cites a ghoulish version of the traditional “Twelve Days of Christmas” poem in one of the disputed books, where the narrator instead gives his true love raven wings, bags of soot, useless things and a wart snake in a fig tree.

“It starts out as cute little things and each gets worse and worse,” Hill says. “It’s going to start children thinking about the occult.”