Sex Education Popular in Newport Despite Siege

Despite a two-year effort by a traditional-values group to exorcise the sex education curriculum of Newport Mesa-Unified School District, the once-controversial courses remain as popular as ever, educators say.

“Everything that happened certainly didn’t hurt enrollment,” said Mike Marino, a Corona del Mar High School teacher who teaches sex education. “My classes are just as big as they used to be, and I am teaching as many sections as I can handle.”

For almost two years, the district was under fire by conservative religious and political groups who maintained that sex-education and family-life courses served impressionable children “a philosophical agenda that destroys values and divides families.”

Much of the outcry centered on Marino and his colleague Maya Decker, whose classrooms were monitored constantly by parents and others who opposed much of the subject matter. Decker said teachers were also harassed by threatening phone calls.

“It was a rough year or two,” Marino said. “I don’t want to reopen old wounds. I don’t want to live it all over again. I haven’t heard from my critics with any degree of volume. Once defeated, they became silent.”

The controversy reached a zenith during the November, 1989, school board election when two candidates, backed by the Committee to Restore Ethical and Traditional Education (CREATE), called for a complete overhaul of the sex-education curriculum.

Both challengers were defeated by almost 2-1 margins. But, before the dust had settled, the district formalized existing parental permission procedures for the classes, ended lectures on sexual deviance and human sexual response, and banned the use of homosexual speakers, ending a 20-year practice in Marino’s class.

Yet, the changes fell far short of CREATE’s demands that class time should be devoted almost exclusively to teaching youths how to abstain from sex and fend off sexual advances. Anything short of that, the group maintained, would plunge students “into the abyss of an ‘anything-goes world’ of amoral social behavior.”

School board members say they have not heard from the group since the election, except some CREATE supporters and the defeated candidates who appeared before them shortly after the election to oppose restrictions on classroom visitation.

The new rules hit close to home for the organization, which used to regularly visit sex education and family life classes at Corona del Mar High School. Teachers and school board members called the constant scrutiny disruptive and politically motivated.

“The classes are progressing very satisfactorily,” said Carol Berg, the school district’s assistant superintendent of curriculum. “There is a waiting list to get in those classes and the parents are still very supportive. As far as I’m concerned the controversy is history.”

At Corona del Mar, both family-life classes have been filled to their capacities of 60 students. But Decker, who now heads the teacher’s association and no longer teaches, says that the continued success of the courses is no cause for complacency by the school board.

District officials say three or four adults, who do not have children in school, continue to review course materials and could try to reassert what Decker describes as a dangerous agenda that would foster ignorance rather than knowledge.

“My kids have handled the courses in a mature way, sometimes they’re more mature than some adults,” Decker said. “The wonderful part of this was all the people who came out in support of the classes. They need to be aware that the district should not let the course disappear. Kids need this information.”