A Queen-Size Controversy : School Takes Steps to Prevent Repeat of Homecoming ‘Disaster’

Valley Christian High had chosen a homecoming queen every year for more than 30 years until last fall. The small, private school did away with the ceremony celebrating beauty and popularity on the principle that it was unchristian.

And everything went wrong.

Not only was there no queen, but the lights did not work at the halftime show, the public address system was inaudible, the alumni were restless, and students said they felt cheated.

Despite the debacle, the school board and faculty have decided after a series of recent meetings to stick to a changed format. Students will choose male and female “ambassadors” from the senior class in the categories of service, leadership, Christian character and creativity.

Stan Cole, an English and drama teacher who pushed hard for the revision, defended the new policy. “What the homecoming queen comes down to, it’s either beauty or magnetism. People are being evaluated over things they don’t have much control over,” Cole said.

School administrators acknowledge that the changes took many parents and students by surprise when the school’s 475 students arrived on campus last fall. The officials were startled by the resulting furor. About 120 students and parents signed a petition in protest, including parent Alice Garner.

“I didn’t like it at all,” Garner said of losing the homecoming queen tradition. “And the school didn’t listen.”

Her son Bill, a senior, echoed the feelings of many classmates. “I thought it was good the way it was,” he said.

The school, however, has a responsibility to re-examine its practices from a moral standpoint, Principal Tim Hoeksema said. “We have been critically looking at everything we do in light of our mission and purpose as a Christian school. The lifting up of one student on the basis of personal characteristics they have no control over--we just thought that was contrary to what we are all about as a Christian school.”

Officials had misgivings about how competitive and expensive choosing a queen had become. Satin dresses had become the norm for the queen’s court. Next year, student honorees will ride the floats in Sunday dress but not expensive formal wear.

Another problem was that the students, who chose the queen by popular vote, sometimes put forward “joke candidates,” girls singled out because they were not especially popular or beautiful.

“There were a lot more people being hurt than built up,” teacher Cole said.

But alumnus Jack Wiersma, who has put three children through the school, would have preferred to modify rather than abandon the tradition.

“Why not put some Christian perspective to the old method?” Wiersma said. He conceded that choosing a queen set up some girls for disappointment. “Welcome to the real world,” he observed. “If we’re going to protect our kids from disappointment, let’s not give them any accolades.”

All in all, the dispute “was probably the most explosive change in our community in a number of years,” Hoeksema said.

Such controversy is foreign and unsettling to the close-knit religious community that sends its children to the school.

Calvinist dairymen of Dutch ancestry opened the school “to provide an opportunity for children to be instructed in the fear of the Lord, in accordance with His word,” according to a history of the school. Under the leadership of elders from a handful of nearby churches, the school ushered in generation after generation of students with names such as Van Der Weide, Veldhuizen, Hoekstra, Schaafsma and Van Der Meulen. Students attend weekly chapel during school and take religion courses every year.

In the last 30 years, housing subdivisions have replaced the area’s dairies, and the community has diversified. The school has broadened its base, drawing students from 95 congregations as far away as Anaheim. About 87% of its students are white; most of the rest are Asian. The entire school system, overseen by a superintendent and a board, includes the high school and junior high in Cerritos and an elementary school in Bellflower. Tuition runs as high as $3,700 a year for the high school.

Parents who prize the school as a religious alternative to public education view criticism of school officials as almost unchristian.

Alumna Darlene Wigboldy wants nothing to do with the controversy--even though one daughter was a homecoming queen and another missed a chance to be one this year.

“We’re one big, close family,” she said of the school. “Christ is first. We would not cause any friction, and I surely wouldn’t go protest.”

But eliminating the queen was more than many could tolerate in silence.

Parent Amy Mack said she appreciated the good intentions, “but every class feels they’re entitled to the same thing the other class had,” she said. “The kids didn’t like it, and (once they graduate) they’re never going to be seniors again.”

Homecoming, like at many other schools, encompasses a week of activities leading up to the big football game. Students typically dress as old folks on one day, hippies on another, and in school colors on a third day. There is a bonfire and a “powder-puff football” game for girls. And classes design floats for the school’s version of a mini-Rose Parade around the track on game night.

These elements remained and even went well, prompting officials to hope homecoming night itself would sail along.

But on Nov. 1, 1991, alumni and parents descended on the clean and tidy 27-acre campus nestled south of Artesia Boulevard between the San Gabriel River and the San Gabriel River Freeway in Cerritos. The football team, on its way to a conference championship, squashed Orange Lutheran. But little else went as planned.

“Many students boycotted homecoming. Many parents boycotted,” Principal Hoeksema said. A mock tombstone with “Homecoming” on it “got more applause than anything else.”

Some students wore black armbands and carried protest signs.

The suspense of the queen’s crowning was lost, and few could hear the introductions of honorees because the sound system malfunctioned.

Spectators were disappointed with the halftime show, an uninspiring student clown skit. When the stadium lights were dimmed to make way for spotlights, the spotlights failed. And then the stadium lights would not go back on right away.

“It was, admittedly, a disaster,” Hoeksema said. “Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.”

The school subsequently assigned a committee, headed by Cole, to study homecoming--not to bring back the queen but to ease the transition.

School officials point out that a majority of families did not sign the protest petition.

Next fall’s ceremony will be similar in concept to the last. But officials already have begun planning to avoid another fiasco. Even the halftime entertainment should be better, with the band and the drill and flag squads scheduled to return with one of their popular shows. And some of the prizes and awards will be announced at homecoming, to provide some suspense.

“We want an attractive thing that people can be proud of,” said Dan Copeland, superintendent of the Christian school system. “If you change the thing and it comes off poorly, people feel you’re trying to destroy the thing that they cherished. That wasn’t the intention at all.”