MOORPARK : Schools to Continue Teaching ‘The Cay’

The Moorpark Unified School District will continue to teach a novel that the local NAACP wants banned from classrooms, the school board decided Tuesday.

Supt. Thomas G. Duffy told the board that the 1968 novel “The Cay” by Theodore Taylor does not foster racial bigotry, and the board voted 3 to 1 that it should continue to be taught to the district’s middle school students.

Board Chairman Tom Baldwin dissented. “I would like to see us rethink the use of the book,” Baldwin said.

Board member Pam Castro abstained, saying that no formal complaint has been filed against the book.

In January, a spokesman for the Ventura County chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People said the group considered the book offensive to blacks and wanted it removed from the Moorpark school district’s reading list. NAACP officials said at the time, however, that they were not opposed to having “The Cay” remain in school libraries.

Since then, Duffy and most board members have read the book, which is about a young boy who befriends an older black man when the boy is shipwrecked on a Caribbean island.

NAACP spokesman Theodore Green said the group objects to passages in the book that describe the black man as ugly and stupid. But school officials have said the book shows how the boy overcomes his prejudice against blacks through his friendship with the man.