Attempt to Teach Tolerance Backfires : Education: A teacher invited her gay son to speak to her second-grade class. But the incident created a controversy at the San Diego school and the educator has been reprimanded for the unauthorized visit.

When her second-grade students made some childish but homophobic comments, teacher Toni Wanic thought she knew a gentle way to teach tolerance.

She invited her 27-year-old son, who is gay, to come to her class the next day and answer her students’ questions about gay people and AIDS and whether gays are irredeemably different from other people.

Wanic’s students asked questions without hesitation: Do all gay people have AIDS? Does everyone with AIDS die? When did you know you were gay? Was your mother mad at you when you told her? Have you ever had sex with a man?

“I just told them: ‘Hey, whatever you are, be happy with that,’ ” said Wanic’s son, Nick Ashton-Hart, a computer manager in the tour industry. “If you’re straight, fine. If you’re gay, fine.”

Wanic, 48, considered the session “a supreme education moment” because it allowed her students’ questions to be answered and their fears of the unknown to be overcome.

But when the principal at Oak Park Elementary School heard that Ashton-Hart had talked to his mother’s class, she had a far different view.

Principal Juel Moore demanded that Wanic apologize to parents for not notifying them in advance of her son’s talk, which would have allowed them to withdraw their children from the class if they did not want their children to hear the discussion. Wanic refused.

Moore formally reprimanded Wanic for breaking district policies that require a teacher to notify both the parents and the principal before bringing in an outside speaker, particularly on a controversial topic such as homosexuality.

“At the beginning of the school year, we discussed the district-approved curriculum,” Moore wrote Wanic. “Currently, alternative lifestyles is not among subjects we are permitted to teach.”

Moore also withdrew a promise to recommend Wanic for a job at another school where her special education skills could be utilized.

“The parents were upset, and they had every right to be,” said Kimiko Fukuda, an assistant area superintendent for the San Diego school system. “Common sense tells you this is not the kind of thing that elementary teachers should normally be discussing.”

The district administration supports the veteran principal’s decision to give the first-year teacher a letter of reprimand. “I think the principal was making a point to a teacher who was not listening,” Fukuda said.

Wanic is concerned that the mini-controversy and reprimand could have a chilling effect on the other teachers who want to stem homophobia among their students. She is backed by Al Best, chairman of the San Diego Civil Service Commission, which deals with personnel matters involving city government employees.

Although the Civil Service Commission has no authority in school matters, Best wants to take the issue to the school board. He is upset at the idea that having someone discuss the need to respect gay people is tantamount to teaching an alternative lifestyle.

“I am not going to turn loose of this,” said Best, who is gay. “It angers me that we have things like this going on.”

Fukuda said Wanic should have contacted both her principal and the district official responsible for sex, drug and AIDS education. The latter could have arranged for a consultant to talk to Wanic’s class, and also for parents to be given proper notice, Fukuda said.

“The issue is that proper procedures were not followed,” Fukuda said.

The district has a lesson about HIV and AIDS that has been approved by the national Parent Teacher Assn. and is taught to first-graders. The lesson stresses that AIDS cannot be spread by being in the same class as someone with AIDS, but does not discuss the sexual transmission of the disease.

Oak Park Elementary, set in a racially diverse, blue-collar neighborhood, is a magnet school offering enhanced academics and music instruction. Wanic’s son talked to the one-hour-a-day enrichment class on American Sign Language that Wanic taught during the school year that ended last week.

One father wrote to Moore to protest Ashton-Hart’s alleged attempt to “promote his lifestyle” to second-graders. The father said he learned about Ashton-Hart’s talk when he asked his daughter the proverbial parental question: What did you learn in school today?

“My daughter proudly pronounced, ‘I learned that gays are born that way, and that we shouldn’t make fun of them or tease them because what they do is not wrong and no different from what anyone else does.’ ”

The principal met with protesting parents and sent each parent a letter of apology.

The district’s social health policy requires that parents be given 15 days notice before any lesson dealing with sex, reproduction or venereal disease is taught. The policy on controversial issues says all outside speakers must be approved by the principal and that discussions inappropriate to the students’ maturity level will not be allowed.

Wanic said she had no idea that inviting her son to talk to her class late last month violated any district policy.

“All I wanted to do was teach respect for a human being who happens to be gay,” Wanic said. “I wanted to take a negative experience and turn it around into something positive.”

The negative experience had occurred the day before her son came to class. During show-and-tell, a girl had announced that her family was helping a gay man deal with AIDS.

“There was an outpouring from half of the class, an expression of disgust,” Wanic said. “It was very pronounced. I was very taken aback by it.”

Ashton-Hart said he told his mother’s students that they probably all know someone who is gay even though the students may not realize it. “I told them that some of us who are gay hide it because people won’t like us,” he said.

He said he did not deal with sexuality except when a boy asked if he had ever had sex with a man. “I said yes and that was the end of it,” Ashton-Hart said.

Despite the flap, Wanic, who will be teaching at a different school in the fall, does not regret what she did.

“If we’re ever going to teach people not to hate each other,” Wanic said, “we’ve got to start before they are 30.”