OXNARD : Trustees to Discuss Columbus Lessons

Oxnard Elementary School District trustees will review tonight how the district plans to teach its 12,100 students about the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to the Americas.

The trustees will be given an overview of course materials in order to anticipate issues that are sensitive to diverse groups in the community, said Jeanne P. Adams, who is in charge of curriculum and instructional services for the district.

The district wants to present materials to students “in a very sensitive way,” Adams said.

Social science teachers, curriculum advisers and the district’s media coordinator will evaluate for the board how district textbooks address the subject, she said.

The board will review a statement developed by the National Council for the Social Studies in which the educational group urges the nation’s schools not “to ignore or to treat romantically” Columbus’ voyage.

Warning educators about the “public hyperbole that is likely to surround the quincentenary,” the council has cautioned schools to avoid describing Columbus’ exploration as a discovery of America.

“The land that Columbus encountered was not a new world,” the council said in its statement. “Rather, it was a world of peoples with rich and complex histories dating back at least 15,000 years or possibly earlier.”

The council also recommended that schools teach about the “catastrophic mortality rates” experienced by Native Americans, after contact with European and African immigrants, through disease and territorial wars.

The board will meet at 7:30 p.m. at the district’s headquarters, 1051 S. A St. in Oxnard.