Temporary Ban Upheld on Schoolbooks

The Hacienda La Puente Unified School District Board of Education early Tuesday upheld a temporary ban on reading books that sparked a debate about morbid imagery but agreed to reprint and keep teaching some less controversial stories and poems while it evaluates the entire series.

The compromise, reached after more than five hours of heated discussion, failed to appease many of the 500 people who squeezed into the Cedarlane Junior High School auditorium in Hacienda Heights.

“They have to terminate the whole series,” said Denise Hill, who took her 8-year-old daughter Daphne out of class this week and will enroll her in private school. “We won’t be satisfied with them removing just a portion of the books. There are still stories about magic.”

On the other side were parents like Mark A. Peterson, who warned that the hysteria could lead to book-burning. “What is involved is a basic attack on the liberties of all of us in this country,” he said. “If we object to these stories, the next step is to attack and remove other stories which have been told in Western society for generations.”

The debate focuses around “Impressions,” a series of literature-based reading books published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston of Canada Ltd. and used in first through sixth grades. Protests have already been mounted in several Oregon and Washington communities where religious activists have claimed that the series promotes witchcraft and magic.

The books have also raised issues about conflicts between First Amendment rights and parents’ rights to censor what their children read. Not all the selections in the “Impressions” series are considered objectionable; some are classics like William Farley’s “The Black Stallion.”

School administrators defend the series as a whole, however, and blame the protests on a group of parents with strong religious beliefs who have inflamed others in the district, which has 22,295 students from La Puente, Hacienda Heights, Industry and Valinda.

School officials also say that some of the controversial stories had been removed from a revised edition they reviewed and approved earlier this year.

For instance, officials approved books that contained the standard “Twelve Days of Christmas” but got instead in one of the books a version with “a wart snake in a fig tree.”

“An honest mistake was made,” said Irv Rem, the assistant superintendent for instructional services who said the textbook series cost $378,000. “The books my board received to review were not the edition of books that were shipped.”

Parents responded with cries of “Send them back! Let’s get our money back!” They also threatened to picket the district, take their children out of school for a day and vote out school board members.