Books OKd; Two Yucaipa School Trustees Face Recall

Two members of the Yucaipa Joint Unified School District board are facing a recall movement in the wake of a board vote to retain a set of grade-school readers that critics say promote satanism and are inappropriate for youngsters.

Rejecting intense community pressure to ban the books, the board did agree to provide special classes for children whose parents object to the “Impressions” reading series. But that step was not enough for the foes of the controversial books, some of whom have launched the recall effort against two board members.

“I’m sorry it has come to this, but we as parents feel the board has ignored our concerns,” said Carolyn Eckert, a parent supporting the recall. “There are some nice stories in these books, but mostly it’s a steady diet of negative material.”

The board’s 4-1 vote, which capped a marathon meeting before a crowd of 1,000 Tuesday night, makes Yucaipa, a small community east of San Bernardino, the first Southern California school district to vote to retain the Impressions series in the face of parental protests.

School boards in the East Whittier and Hacienda La Puente districts have voted to return the books to the publisher, while the Redondo Beach school board is scheduled to decide the matter next month.

Supporters of the series praised the Yucaipa school board members as courageous and characterized their vote as an important victory in the fight against censorship.

“These books were selected by educators who are trained in choosing curriculum,” said Beth Watson, whose 9-year-old son, Jeffrey, uses the Impressions book in his fourth-grade class. “We should do our parenting at home and leave the teaching to the teachers.”

Michael Hudson, general counsel and western director of People for the American Way, called the vote “a key turning point” in the mushrooming nationwide battle over the books and said he hoped the Yucaipa vote would inspire school board members in other districts to hold firm.

“Hopefully other school boards will now stand up to this intimidation and we can stop this dangerous wildfire,” Hudson said.

Immediately after the Yucaipa board’s vote, however, two trustees--Stephen Miller and Board President Jan Mishodek--were served with intent-to-recall notices by several parents. The two other trustees voting in favor of Impressions could not be targeted because they have been on the board too short a time.

The recall proponents now plan to circulate petitions calling for a vote to replace the two board members.

As in other school districts, the debate over the Impressions series has caused bitter divisions among teachers, administrators and parents in Yucaipa. The books were approved last spring by 80% of the district’s teachers and first used at the beginning of the 1989-90 academic year.

Some parents, however, found the contents objectionable and promptly complained. Schools were picketed, and fundamentalist Christian groups such as Citizens for Excellence in Education--which describes the books as “morbid” and too graphic for children--added their protests to the fray.

“The series is full of negative, frightening, disrespectful and violent kinds of material,” Eckert said. “Our children will get plenty of that in real life. Why spoon-feed it to them now?”

In response to the uproar, school Supt. John Wilde formed a special committee of teachers, parents and administrators that reviewed the books. The committee’s 30-page report recommended keeping the readers but providing options for parents who did not want their children exposed to them.

Paul Jessup, the district’s coordinator of curriculum, said a separate language arts program for those students will be developed using literary works from a state-recommended list of books. Should children require transportation to other school locations in order to take part in the program, that responsibility will be up to the parent, officials said.