Abusive Letters From Students Fuel School Aid Debate

Aides to Gov. Pete Wilson say teachers are pressuring schoolchildren to write letters, some of which have been abusive, to state politicians to protest potential school funding cuts.

One letter sent to Wilson by a junior high school girl concluded: “I hate your guts and your mothers too. I hope someone stuffs a bomb in your mouth and blows your head off. And then I hope they cut off your hands and burn them.”

Those involved in the debates stress that schoolchildren have sent only a small number of hostile or threatening letters to legislators, the governor or members of his staff.

The correspondence nevertheless has been cited by those on both sides of the school financing controversy to advance their arguments.

Wilson’s proposed 1991-92 budget has called for suspension of Proposition 98, the voter-approved school funding guarantee, and a $2-billion cut in state school spending.

Some say the letters from students and their families are evidence of the desperate need for more education money; others call them proof that teachers are using children as lobbyists to advance their own economic cause.

“You really feel an anger and a hate” in some of the letters, said Bill Livingstone, Wilson’s press secretary.

He said that some of the letters urging Wilson not to suspend Proposition 98 contain political messages that appear too sophisticated for students to have generated on their own. One batch from a school in Vacaville, he noted, contained numerous references to the need to spend state money on schools instead of prisons.

A number of letters sent to legislators or the governor’s office have been threatening. More than a dozen hostile letters were traced to one Bay Area third-grader who signed the names of some of his friends and the Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles. He wrote to Sen. Milton Marks (D-San Francisco), “I hate you . . . I want to eat your head.”

In some cases, school principals said students sent letters directly or returned sealed letters to their classrooms that were not screened by teachers before they were sent.

Many educators, while concerned about the content of some letters, are angry at suggestions that they are the source of students’ unhappiness about the state of school financing.

Bob Cone, principal at Juan Crespi Junior High School in El Sobrante, said he was unaware that a threatening letter apparently was written by one of his students. He said children at his school are taught to be civic-minded and to express their feelings, but would never be encouraged to use violent language.

At the same time, he noted that emotions are running high in the Richmond Unified School District, where Wilson and teachers have been locked in a dispute over how to address a fiscal crisis that earlier this month threatened early closure of 47 schools until a court intervened.

Ed Foglia of the California Teachers Assn. said the perception that teachers are brainwashing children is “totally unfair.”

“Some of them are using very, very poor language, and we should not condone that,” said Foglia. “But there is a sense of frustration out there.”