Christian Right Plunges Into Nearly 2 Dozen School Races : Conservatism: Several groups step up efforts in ‘spiritual battle’ to influence local boards and promote a shift in education policy.

Conservative Christian groups are stepping up their efforts to influence school board races in Orange County, lending active support to nearly two dozen candidates who they hope will bring about a political shift to the right in local education policy.

The Pro-Family Coalition and Rev. Lou Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition are circulating the names of 23 candidates who they say espouse conservative causes and are opposed to unrestricted abortion. In some districts, such as Capistrano Unified, these candidates could gain a majority on the school board.

Robert Simonds, the leader of Santa Ana-based Citizens for Excellence in Education, a national group that favors a return of biblical values to the schools, has proclaimed a “spiritual battle” to get Christians elected to office on all levels nationwide, but will not identify the candidates who have sought his advice on tactics and strategies.

There are 41 seats up for grabs on 17 Orange County school boards on Tuesday. The Orange County Pro-Family Coalition has thrown its support behind candidates for 23 of them because they have “strong traditional family values” and generally oppose abortion, except in special circumstances.

In a questionnaire it distributed to candidates, the coalition asked, among other things, if they oppose sex-education programs that portray premarital sex and abortion as “responsible and acceptable choices,” and if they oppose school-based health clinics and the distribution of condoms on campus.

The Coalition lists the 23 candidates’ names on flyers along with the names of other candidates for city, state and national offices, and says it is distributing about 100,000 around Orange County. Many have been placed under the windshield wipers of cars in church parking lots.

Mary Curtius, who heads the Pro-Family Coalition, said her flyers are circulated mostly in the Christian community because Christians are more sympathetic to the positions of the coalition. “We’re not going to pass them out at (National Organization for Women) meetings,” she said.

The Anaheim-based Traditional Values Coalition, a conservative national Christian lobby and education group, is supporting the same candidates. Sheldon said his group’s political action committee donated money to one school board candidate, Lou Lopez, who is running in Anaheim Union High School District. For the others, his followers have offered to walk precincts and make phone calls, and Sheldon himself talks up as many of the candidates as he can at his public appearances.

In evaluating candidates, the Traditional Values Coalition focused on three issues and how they are handled in the classroom: abortion, abstinence and homosexuality. It chose candidates it believes will favor a heavy emphasis on abstinence and who will oppose what Sheldon calls “the homosexual agenda” in classroom discussion of AIDS or presenting abortion as a means of birth control.

“We support AIDS education, but we don’t want it to be used as a vehicle for the gay and lesbian agenda,” he said. “We don’t want people teaching that homosexuality is a viable lifestyle. If a speaker comes in to talk about AIDS and brings his same-sex partner, it gives the message that homosexual sex is cool.”

Most of the same candidates have the support of the California Pro-Life Council and the Southern California Christian Times, a San Diego County-based newspaper that publishes endorsements of “pro-family” candidates.

While the Pro-Family Coalition and the Traditional Values Coalition work actively for the election of the local school board aspirants, some of the candidates themselves say they did not seek such support and they fear the alignment could portray them as more conservative than they really are.

Raghu P. Mathur, who is running for reelection in Saddleback Valley Unified, has taken pains to state publicly that while he may favor some restrictions on abortion, he has never received money “from the religious right.”

A good number of the candidates see themselves as mainstream American conservatives trying to gain better representation on school boards dominated by liberals, and many resent what they consider an attempt to paint them all as right-wing religious zealots.

“This isn’t a Christian crusade to take over the schools. We are not the fringe, we are the mainstream of this country,” said J. Michael Sedillo, who is running for the school board in Capistrano Unified, where anti-abortion Christian candidates are seeking all four of the seats available on the seven-member board.

“This is not about Christian doctrine. It’s about traditional family values. This is a conservative-liberal issue, not a religious issue. It’s more a grass-roots wildfire than a conspiracy.”

The conservative candidates differ on key issues. For instance, they are divided on the school-voucher initiative, a proposed 1994 California ballot measure which would allow parents to spend tax dollars to send their children to private schools. They disagree on whether non-English-speaking children should be taught in their native language until they acquire English.

But a good number of the candidates supported by the Pro-Life Coalition and the Tradition Values Coalition share some basic convictions. They say in interviews that they feel schools have lost their moral compass, and they advocate stronger parental control over school policy.

“Right now there is too much social engineering in the schools,” said Steve Caulkins, one of four coalition candidates running in Capistrano Unified. “The district shouldn’t be teaching values. It should teach children to respect their parents’ values.”

If elected in significant numbers, the conservative candidates could make their influence felt in the way abortion is presented in the schools. Some of them believe students should be given a clearer message that abortion is wrong, or be told about the “moral implications” of having an abortion. Others, while they oppose abortion personally, say their views have no place in the classroom. Current state guidelines call for abortion to be presented devoid of value judgment, simply as a way to terminate pregnancy.

Although neither of the two organizations evaluated candidates’ views on creationism, some of those it supports do advocate teaching creationism along with evolution as an equally valid world-origin theory. Such a practice, if implemented, would represent a departure from state curriculum guidelines in practice in nearly all districts, where creationism is presented in social science classes as a religious theory and evolution in science classes as a scientific theory.

Representatives of some of the Christian and anti-abortion groups that have been supporting school board members speak about the need to get like-minded candidates elected to school boards to correct the ills that have evolved in the schools.

Curtius, of the Pro-Family Coalition, said the Christian community is realizing school board races are important because those officials often ascend to higher office, adding, “If we get in on the lowest level, we’re better off.”

“Who governs a school board determines what and how well students learn. It’s much more important than who is President,” said Bob Boyd, who hosts a national Christian radio talk show for Citizens for Excellence in Education. “It’s very important to us to see that Christian citizens have their point of view represented.”

Simonds, the leader of Citizens for Excellence in Education, has written pamphlets advising Christian candidates how to get elected to office, and contends his group has aided thousands of school board aspirants around the country. But he declines to identify the candidates.

“We need strong school board members who know right from wrong,” Simonds says in his how-to-win guide for candidates. “The Bible, being the only true source on right and wrong, should be the guide of board members. Only godly Christians can truly qualify for this critically important position. . . .”

School board incumbents and members of the teaching Establishment fear the conservative groundswell could hide an agenda that features intolerance for any values that differ from those of the religious right.

In Capistrano Unified, where four of seven seats are up for reelection, the teachers’ union endorsed a combination of incumbents and challengers. None of the coalition-backed candidates--Caulkins, Sedillo, Dustin Etheredge or Don Richardson--won support.

“We felt they were not ultimately for academic freedom and that some of their views could lead to censorship in the curriculum,” said union president Lois Anderson. “We felt they had a narrow perspective.”

Some members of the education community believe some of the candidates are being less than honest when they claim they are not helping each other or receiving help from conservative Christian activist groups such as Citizens for Excellence in Education or the Traditional Values Coalition.

“These candidates like to come across as innocent, but they’re not,” said Elizabeth Parker, a member of the Orange County Board of Education. “They believe in many of the same things. It’s a very organized, very concerted campaign.”

Louise Adler, a former Saddleback Valley school board member who now teaches at Cal State Fullerton, has researched trends in book and curriculum censorship across California and says most of the challenges in recent years have come from parents who object to materials as offensive to their religious values.

She said she believes that if more conservative Christians are elected to school boards, those elected bodies will become more sympathetic to attempts at censorship of textbooks and other materials.

“It would change the way we do business in the schools, and that’s of interest to the public,” Adler said.

Mike Hudson, West Coast vice president of People for the American Way, a liberal national civil rights group, said that after two years of monitoring Christian political activism, he believes conservative Christian candidates shift their positions on issues to survive media scrutiny.

“Maybe some candidates will say they don’t think their own moral views should be taught in the classroom, and maybe some will say they think creationism should not be taught,” he said. “It will be interesting to see what they actually do once they are elected.”

This year, Capistrano Unified has drawn more attention from the conservative Christian movement than any other district. The district was the subject of intense publicity last year when it prevailed in a court fight over teacher John Peloza’s attempts to teach creationism in his science class. Steve Sheldon, political director of the Traditional Values Coalition, said Capistrano is “a particular area of concern” because of its “hostility toward discussing creationism. We see that as hostile to our values.”