2 Trustees Push Their Causes With Little Effect : Education: Santa Ana school board duo is often on the losing end of 3-2 votes. But both ensure their conservative views are at least aired.

School board trustees Tom Chaffee and Rosemarie Avila want to teach children American values, reform bilingual education and keep the federal government off their backs.

Wish them luck.

While the two conservatives may be in lock-step with the nation’s conservative political tide, they are the so-called minority members of the Santa Ana Unified School District Board of Education, and often are viewed by colleagues, school officials and residents as the school board rebels.

Chaffee and Avila acknowledge that they frequently differ with other board members; the voting record shows they often land on the losing end of 3-2 votes. But the two say they are fighting to preserve nothing less than their versions of American values.

“When you’re on the short side of a 3-to-2 vote, you don’t get a lot accomplished,” Chaffee acknowledged. “But I’m not going to give up. I’m not going to quit.

“If nothing else,” he added, “now they [the other board members] have to justify things.”

Critics say that in addition to providing a few bad ideas, the two bring a lot of tension and distraction to the board.

“It gets a little frustrating sometimes to have a board member just rattle on when you have business to get to,” Trustee Sal Mendoza said.

Recently, Chaffee and Avila failed to stop the district from hiring 10 bilingual education teachers from Spain, but had maintained that the Europeans could not properly teach American values. Chaffee acknowledged that it is hard to decipher what American values are, but said the Spanish teachers could not fully convey “what it took to make this country, its history, and where it’s headed.”

“You need to keep some roots here,” Chaffee said. “Multicultural diversity is almost to the point where it seems it has made American culture wrong. It’s fine to celebrate Cinco de Mayo and the Tet New Year, but it’s not OK to learn nothing about Memorial Day. I don’t want cultural diversity to mean American values are wrong.”

Also, Chaffee said he opposed hiring the teachers because he opposes many of the district’s bilingual education programs.

The dust had hardly settled when Supt. Al Mijares did indeed justify his actions. In an impassioned speech to the school board, Mijares acknowledged that he might have communicated more clearly with the board about hiring the teachers, but reasserted his authority to make such decisions. Mijares went on to list the many countries from which teachers now working in the school district have received their credentials, including Vietnam, Iran and India.

Mendoza said he voted to hire the teachers simply because they were qualified and because the district needed them.

Added Santa Ana PTA President Kathi Jo Brunning: “I don’t think there’s any way, shape or form those teachers are going to influence [the students] away from American values. It’s ludicrous.”

Avila, a 47-year-old homemaker who once taught elementary school, was elected to the board in 1991 on a platform focusing on reading, writing, arithmetic and promoting American values. During the campaign, she came under fire for having schooled her children at home. Two years into her term, she was censured by the board for allegedly leaking documents to the newspaper relating to the acquisition of land for a school site. Chaffee, elected to the school board that same year, joined Avila in opposing the censure.

Soon after taking office, Chaffee, a 43-year-old industrial building engineer, was criticized for pulling four of his six children out of the Santa Ana school district and enrolling them in Bethel Baptist, a private Christian school. He defended the action by saying his children had been harassed at school because of his opposition to bilingual education.

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About 75% of the students in the Santa Ana Unified School District have limited English skills. Some are taught in their native language, while others are taught almost wholly in English.

Chaffee and Avila said that children learn English more quickly through the so-called immersion method of teaching almost everything, even math, in English.

But Anaida Colon-Muniz, who heads the district’s bilingual programs, notes that a 1993 district policy calls for the use of various bilingual programs. (Avila voted against accepting the 1993 policy; Chaffee had not yet been elected to the board.)

Colon-Muniz defended the policy, noting that each student is different. “We had English immersion, and it wasn’t working” for some students, she said.

Chaffee and Avila also have qualms about receiving federal grant money because of strings attached to the grants, such as student surveys, force local school districts to comply with what they consider intrusive and misguided federal guidelines.

Colon-Muniz said that at the behest of Chaffee and Avila, the school district did begin asking for parental permission before surveying students about their self-esteem. But she said some federal guidelines, such as those asking for statistics to demonstrate the effectiveness of teaching programs, only make sense.

Chaffee said he is not flatly opposed to receiving federal money; after all, it is the public’s money. But he said the U.S. Department of Education should be eliminated, and the money distributed in bloc grants to the states or directly to school districts.

Former school board member and current Santa Ana City Councilman Ted R. Moreno noted that if Chaffee and Avila refuse federal grant money, other school districts will simply snatch it up. He said that if the school board members oppose federal grants, they should fight to abolish or reform them at the federal level.

Chaffee and Avila said they have made those efforts to change federal grants at the federal level.

Chaffee said he has written to members of Congress and presidential candidates Phil Gramm and Pat Buchanan asking them to abolish the Department of Education and requesting that federal money be given directly to the state or local school district with no strings attached.

“It’s good that someone is looking at the strings,” said Brunning, the PTA president. “But sometimes it’s too much and not in the best interest of the children.”

Chaffee and Avila are misguided, Brunning said, if not having federal funds means not having money to feed needy schoolchildren.

Chaffee said he is not opposed to feeding needy children, possibly through programs based in Orange County. But he would oppose using a federal program such as Head Start.

“You do that, and you’re creating a dependent society,” he said. “I just can’t buy into that.”

Avila said that when she votes, one overriding issue she tries to promote is freedom. She said one way to do that is to limit government.

And how does that play out on the school board?

Avila notes that her oath of office requires her to uphold the Constitution against enemies of the country, both foreign and domestic. Some of them, she said, just happen to be her fellow school board members.

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Minority Vote

Tom Chaffee

* Age: 43

* Profession: Industrial building engineer

* Family: Married, six children

* Elected to board: 1993

* Term expires: 1998

* On minority board status: “When you’re on the short side of a 3-to-2 vote, you don’t get a lot accomplished. But I’m not going to give up. I’m not going to quit.”

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Rosemarie Avila

* Age: 47

* Profession: Housewife; has teaching credential

* Family: Married, five children

* Elected to board: 1991

* Term expires: 1996

* On American values: “If you don’t teach people freedom and limited government, you’ve lost your country and what people came here for.”

Source: Tom Chaffee and Rosemarie Avila