Teacher Pops the Wrong Question : Prophesy: Westminster man faces firing after asking girl, 16, to marry him. He says God, symbolized by a bunny, played Cupid.

A Lynwood High School teacher from Westminster who says he followed God’s instructions when he proposed to a 16-year-old student could lose his job over the incident.

The school board went into closed session Tuesday night to review results of an internal investigation of the marriage proposal by speech teacher Jerry Chambers.

Although the board took no official action, district sources confirmed that dismissal proceedings against Chambers were almost a certainty. The likely grounds for firing Chambers would be immoral conduct or incompetence because of mental disability, the sources said.

Chambers, who lives in Westminster, will be on administrative leave with pay, pending board action.

“The Lord told me to propose to her, and the Lord’s given me a number of prophecies about this and other things,” said Chambers, 32, who insists he has done nothing illegal or improper. “They’re trying to find the law that I’ve broken.”

Sheriff’s deputies investigated, but the district attorney’s office concluded that there is not sufficient evidence to file criminal charges against Chambers, said Sgt. David Zabokrtsky of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Lynwood station.

Officials of the Lynwood Unified School District declined to comment specifically about Chambers.

“The top priority in this district is maintaining the safety, security and well-being of every student in the district,” Supt. Audrey Clarke said. “Any action the district takes will be to pursue that goal.”

Chambers acknowledges that he proposed several times to the girl, at least once sending a singing messenger dressed in a bunny costume to the girl’s home.

“I chose the bunny because it symbolizes my invisible friend who tells the future,” Chambers said, “the same invisible friend who told me to propose to her.”

He added that he never made any physical advances. He said he got to know the girl when she visited him in his class.

“She would come and visit me every day,” Chambers said. “She would ditch other classes to visit me. She was never enrolled in my class.”

The girl, contacted at home, said she did not want to comment on the matter, but in a report submitted to the district, she wrote that she first began visiting Chambers’ class after hearing about his unorthodox teaching methods and his affinity for predictions.

“At this point,” she wrote, “I was having thoughts about what God meant to me, and I realized that this man could very well be speaking with God, as he claimed. This is when we began praying together.”

The girl added that she was unprepared for Chambers’ proposal. “I was stunned,” she wrote. “He spoke of prenuptial agreements where I’d get everything in a divorce. He spoke of birth control or operations for birth-control reasons because ‘God didn’t want us to have children. The time for having children was over.’ ”

When Chambers persisted in his proposals, the girl and her parents complained to the district. Lynwood High Principal Mickey L. Cureton filed a suspicion of child-abuse complaint against Chambers.

Deputies found insufficient evidence to file charges, but the district put Chambers on administrative leave with pay on June 16, pending the outcome of its own investigation.

Chambers said he was suspended after a stormy meeting with Cureton.

“Cureton told me that I haven’t violated the Penal Code, but he said, ‘You have violated the Education Code, and you’re going to be suspended and terminated.’

“Then the Lord told me to ask Cureton where the rule was that I had violated.

“I said, ‘Cureton, where is it?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know, but I know it’s in there somewhere.’

“I said, ‘Where is it?’ And he started raising his voice, and he said, ‘I know it’s in there somewhere.’ And he slammed his fist on the table and terminated the meeting,” Chambers said.

Chambers, who began teaching in Lynwood in 1989, has been the center of disputes before. Last fall, he complained that the principal was trampling on his free-speech rights by not allowing him to place prophecies in the school bulletin. He briefly paraded around campus with a flag in protest.

Some students defended Chambers last year when they felt that the administration tried to silence his class discussions of controversial issues.

This year, Chambers said he taught biblical prophecy as a kind of rhetoric that can allow a person to predict the future, a gift he said he possesses.

“I predicted everything that has happened in the Soviet Union this year,” he said. Many of his predictions center on the belief that former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev will return to power and set in motion the second coming of Jesus.

“The Lord has told me that Gorbachev is the beast. He’s going to rise to power again, and when he takes over, the period of tribulations is going to begin,” Chambers said.

Chambers said he has given up on his marriage proposal. He interprets his rejection as symbolic of the world’s rejection of religious truth.

“The Lord told me she said yes,” he noted. “She’s done nothing but say no.”