New Vision for Vista Schools : After Recall of Religious Conservatives on School Board, Moderates Are Casting Off Many of Its Policies.

Never in her wildest dreams did Barbara Donovan imagine running for office, let alone winning a seat on the school board that California education authorities once called “the most closely watched in the state.”

Nor could she have predicted the issues she would inherit as a new board member:

Creationism. Prayer in the schools. A ban on free breakfast programs for underprivileged children. Sex education programs that preached abstinence mixed with fundamentalist religious doctrine. Outright rejection of lucrative state grants.

These had been the calling cards of a three-member “Christian right” majority on the Vista Unified School District board that oversees 23,000 students.

Running a campaign that consisted largely of lobbying area churches, anti-abortion activist Deidre Holliday took office in 1990, followed by John Tyndall and Joyce Lee in 1992, creating the three-member majority. In each case, the margin of victory was narrow.

Enter Donovan, a Republican, a homemaker and mother of three. She began holding grass-roots meetings on how parents and other residents of this San Diego-area community could challenge the three-member majority and stifle the surge that had swept them into office.

Then, she planted herself in the back of the meeting room and began to pepper the new board with questions--so many that she was once threatened with removal by Tyndall.

After confronting the old board repeatedly over the past two years, Donovan declared herself a candidate and led a successful recall last November. Two of the three Christian right members were removed from office, while a third candidate--running to replace the third member of the Christian bloc who had resigned--was defeated.

“Mentally, I still feel like I belong in the back of that hall, and not up front,” she says now.

Thus Donovan became one of five members of a moderate board that, since taking office last month, has repealed many of the old board’s policies. The three-member majority was elected, she said, only because voters “were asleep at the wheel. It was a lesson in the pitfalls of American apathy.”

But Tyndall, who along with Lee lost his seat in the recall, said the three-member majority sought to redefine the fundamental issue of who should be responsible for educating Vista’s children.

“What it all came down to--what Vista was all about--was who’s in control of the child,” Tyndall said. “It’s the same issue presenting itself across the country. Is it the state or is it the parents (in control)? Sure, we had an agenda: Educational accountability. Our other goal was fiscal responsibility. We wanted to make sure educational resources were used for education and not welfare distribution.”

In addition, Tyndall said Lee was concerned about the quality of the district’s teachers, having been one herself, and that Holliday hoped to assure implementation of an abstinence-based sex education program--specifically, the hotly controversial Sex Respect.

Tyndall blamed the group’s downfall on what he called a coalition that targeted the three-member majority--Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way, the Vista Teachers’ Assn., gay and lesbian organizations and the news media.

The divisiveness in Vista, a conservative city of 76,000 that Donovan says is “98% Christian,” has not fully subsided. Some residents continue to push for Sex Respect, the sex education program the old board adopted and which the new board threw out, citing what it called an overt religious message, inaccurate information and racial and gender bias.

Tyndall remains committed to a sex education program that critics openly deplored as heavy-handed moralizing.

“If I’m putting moral values into kids, then so be it,” he said.

He appears to have backing among some Vista students. Students at Rancho Buena Vista High School say a new campus constituency called The Christian Club--formed after the demise of the three-member majority--is gaining in popularity.

“Kids are praying in the classroom all the time,” said Malik Watson, 16, a sophomore at the school. “And no one can stop them.”

The changes in Vista are not unlike those in other parts of the state, or for that matter, the nation. After the November elections, Christian-right majorities were elected to school boards in Bonsall, in north San Diego County; in the Antelope Valley; in Rocklin in Northern California, and in Hemet, where--against legal advice--Sex Respect and two other controversial sex education programs were adopted last fall. (The programs were suspended when a Riverside County judge granted an injunction in a suit filed by outraged parents against the Hemet board.)

Last week, the Hemet Unified School District decided to drop the programs altogether rather than face litigation, and to scale back all of its sex education to the state-mandated minimum--a discussion of AIDS.

Despite the setbacks in Hemet and Vista, People for the American Way, the activist organization founded by Hollywood producer Norman Lear, reports the religious right making significant inroads on school boards throughout California, although lacking majorities on most.

Jean Hessburg, a spokeswoman for the organization, said opponents of the religious right consider Vista a victory since it had become “a national test case” for what an ultra-right school board could do in “blurring the line between church and state.”

And although Donovan said the new board faces problems, the most serious may be the lingering ill will of two years of bickering.

“A lot of healing needs to get on here,” she said. “We had lost our sense of respect for each other, our sense of brotherhood. . . . The people who live here had had enough--of us sniping at each other, board meetings divided down the center, our side, their side. Everyone now is of one mind: To have peace.”

Full peace has not yet come, although one change is readily apparent. Meetings under the former board’s tenure routinely became vicious shouting matches, attended by hundreds of angry parents, often captured by network news crews. Several meetings went past 2 a.m.; most are now over by 9 p.m. Meetings have taken on a placid tone, with the new board wasting little time in reinstating much of what the old board rejected. That includes busing, which the old board drastically reduced, cutting the number of stops from 600 to 200.

“We’re now down to the normal business of running a school district,” Donovan said. “It’s more about roofs, floors and bus routes and less about ideological conflict.”

Teachers, in particular, have welcomed the change. Donovan said the turning point in the recall came last May, when the Vista Teachers Assn. not only endorsed it but actively campaigned for it. They circulated petitions at baseball games and bake sales and in shopping center parking lots. Recall proponents gathered more than 12,000 valid signatures; 9,151 were necessary to put the measure on the ballot.

In November, Donovan captured the highest number of votes, about 19,000 and a 56% majority. Lance Vollmer--a moderate board member who was unseated in 1992--recaptured a seat. Linda Rhoades, a moderate board member and the only incumbent to win reelection, was given the title of board president. Moderate members David Hubbard and Jenny Vervynck also defeated Christian-right opposition.

None swept into office in a landslide, although as Donovan said, recalls rarely gather enough signatures, let alone succeed at the ballot box.

“The day after the (November) election was like the lifting of a veil over Vista,” said Tom Conry, president of the teachers’ association. “Teachers were bouncing into classrooms with a smile on their face. The one-day difference was so remarkable that people realized just how demoralized they had become.”

Tyndall said he felt gloomy enough about the post-recall future of Vista schools to remove four of his five children from the city’s schools and place them in private Christian schools. His remaining child is a high school senior.

He said most of the claims made against him and his counterparts were false. He said the group never intended to destroy public education--which Donovan and Conry call the objective of the religious right--and that, even in Vista, creationism was never meant to be taught as a valid scientific argument.

In the end, Tyndall said, “It was just intolerable (to the teachers union) that three people could control a district the size of Vista who were not in utter lock step with the wisdom of the teachers’ union.”

The three-member majority voted down two state grants--one of $400,000 that funded free breakfasts for poor children, the other a $250,000 adult guidance, Big Brother-like program for lower-income children that Tyndall said had “more to do with welfare than education.” He also objected to the fact that the grants had to be matched, or repaid, albeit over several years.

Donovan calls it money the district turned down “for no good reason” and could have gotten no other way. She also blamed the previous board for alienating former Supt. Rene Townsend, who left a $116,000-a-year position to take a $94,000-a-year job as superintendent of schools in Coronado. Jack Gyves, who came to Vista from the Napa Valley School District, was hired to replace her.

While opponents of the Christian right have trouble seeing the silver lining of its two-year reign, some students are more accommodating. In recent interviews near the Rancho Buena Vista campus, many said the previous board had, in the words of one young woman, “shaken things up” and that Vista needed “a good shaking.”

Brianna Galieti, 17, a senior at the school, said the old board’s creationism policy--which mandated that teachers spend equal time discussing both evolution and divine creation as theories--was a good idea that hurt no one.

“As long as it was the idea being discussed, how could it hurt anyone?” she said. “Some people do believe it, don’t they?”

But Josh Moore, 19, who graduated from Rancho Buena Vista in 1993 at the end of the three-member majority’s first year in office, said: “Creationism should not be in the public schools. Period. That should be up to the individual and not a subject for classroom discussion. Why not bring in Satanism or Buddhism? Aren’t those ideas ?”

As for the talk about sex, Stephanie Vincent, a 15-year-old freshman at Rancho Buena Vista, said most students watched the heated discussions over Sex Respect with a kind of wry bemusement.

“At least on the high school level,” she said with a laugh, “students long ago moved past learning it to doing it. More than anything, we thought it was funny, and around here, everyone can use a good laugh.”