Supt. Weis Takes Aim at Board Majority : Education: County schools chief in a speech assails trustees backed by the Christian right. One member dismisses the attack as a smoke screen.

Ventura County schools chief Charles Weis on Wednesday blasted the county Board of Education, saying its Christian right majority is part of a national movement to inject religion into public education.

“This is not about a fight between me and the Board of Education,” the superintendent said. “I am here as a representative for people like you who think extremist agendas do not belong in public education.”

His remarks before a receptive group of at least 100 people ratcheted up an already escalating battle between Weis and three members of the county school board who received backing from Christian groups during election campaigns.

None of the three trustees attended Weis’ speech at Ventura’s Temple Beth Torah. But one of those board members, Trustee Marty Bates, said in an earlier interview that Weis was using the speech as a smoke screen to cover up problems in the superintendent of schools office.

The Ventura County grand jury is investigating whether the superintendent of schools office misused money intended for schools that teach students who have been expelled or are in Juvenile Hall, Bates said.

And the three-member board majority has confronted Weis on budget decisions recently and has been critical of him in the past for firing a former political rival, he said.

“He loves using those terms--radical right, Christian right, whatever--because it riles some people up,” said Bates, a Thousand Oaks businessman. “I am a little irritated he is taking a political attitude on this. And I think it is a smoke screen.”

Steve Frank, a Simi Valley government relations consultant who often helps organize conservative Christians, attended the meeting along with four conservative school activists.

Frank did not speak publicly during a question-and-answer session after Weis’ address, saying he had just come to observe. But he agreed with Bates’ assessment that Weis’ speech was an effort to divert public attention from other problems facing the superintendent’s office.

The audience appeared overwhelmingly sympathetic to Weis, with several inquiring how to start a recall drive. Weis said he was not involved with any recall efforts, but Neil Demers-Grey of the United Pride Coalition said a group is meeting Monday to organize a recall effort.

Weis was invited to speak at Temple Beth Torah by the Ventura County Pro-Choice Coalition and the synagogue’s program committee. The topic for the speech was the “radical right’s agenda” to take over public education, organizers said.

In comments before the talk, Weis said he agreed to speak because he has become a target of criticism from conservative Christians in Ventura County. Weis said there is a need for open discussion of what he and others believe is a national movement by the Christian conservatives to wrest control of public education.

“People need to know what is happening,” Weis said. “There have been very few educators who have stood up to talk about this.”

He first became aware of this movement, Weis said, after Ojai resident Wendy Larner was elected to the county Board of Education in 1992. When Larner began pushing certain issues--such as providing abstinence-only-based sex education for students in county-run schools--he began researching the religious right, Weis said.

He stepped up his research after Bates and Ventura homemaker Angela N. Miller were elected to the county school board last November and have since often joined with Larner to form a voting majority on the board.

“What is happening at the county board is a mirror of what is happening nationally,” Weis said in an interview.

Conservative Christian candidates nationwide are running for local offices, mainly school boards, in an attempt to inject a religious influence into public education, he said. Many of them are successful by using a “stealth campaign,” being secretive about the real motives until elected, Weis said.

The result, Weis said, has been situations like that in the city of Vista. A Christian majority on that school board voted last year to include the teaching of creationism alongside evolution as a theory for how the universe began.

“This is not about traditional family values,” Weis said before his speech Wednesday night. “It’s about intolerance, segregation and control.”

Two members of the Christian majority in Vista were recalled last November, while a third chose not to seek reelection. Some Ventura County residents promised to launch a similar recall of Larner, Bates and Miller after the three voted last month to suspend the use of speakers from Planned Parenthood and AIDS Care at sex education workshops for teachers.

Larner could not be reached for comment on Weis’ remarks. Miller said she is not concerned with what Weis or any other critic has to say.

“I don’t even read the papers anymore because I don’t want to know what they are saying about me.”