Guarding Against Big Brother Just Some of the Time

So tell us, Mrs. Smith, how long did your labor last? Was the delivery vaginal or Cesarean? Did you breast-feed your baby?

Oh, something else: Is your child a bed-wetter?

Janelle Smith took a look at the health history questionnaire from the Lancaster School District and wondered what was going on here.

All she wanted to do was enroll her kids in their new elementary school. Why all the nosy questions?

So, as The Times’ Beth Shuster reported last Saturday, Smith lodged a protest, calling the inquiry an invasion of privacy.

Lancaster school officials were stunned--not by Smith’s complaint, but by their very own form. Sure, it’s important, in case of emergency, for school nurses to know whether a child takes medication or suffers allergies, but embarrassed officials were at a loss to explain why irrelevant questions were being asked.

They promptly ordered the forms destroyed.

Remarkably, before Smith’s complaint, thousands of Antelope Valley parents in recent years had answered the questions with little more than a shrug.

“I’m surprised that more parents didn’t raise holy heck,” a school official said.

Me too. After all, isn’t this the same Antelope Valley that led last year’s rebellion against the allegedly subversive CLAS test? And wasn’t CLAS alleged to be an invasion of privacy?

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Yes, it was. It was last year, in June, that the Antelope Valley Union High School District, led by then-school board President Billy Pricer, became the first school district to defy the state education code by refusing to administer the California Learning Assessment System, a test designed to compare school performances.

The vote was 3-2, but before long anti-CLAS sentiment took off like a wildfire riding the Santa Anas. Suspicion grew, and when reasonable, concerned parents tried to check out CLAS for themselves, state educators told them, sorry, but to lose the confidentiality would be to compromise the testing process.

Parents were frustrated. Soon Gov. Pete Wilson, once a big CLAS supporter, did what he does so well--the flip-flop. CLAS was abolished.

Was CLAS really so awful?

Ask opponents and you heard that CLAS was anti-family and anti-American, a tool of Big Brother, an insidious attempt to foist “multicultural” values on innocent youth.

CLAS did this by having students read thought-provoking stories and poems and then write prose relating these tales to their own lives.

To many families, one West Hills parent told me, “the end result is that . . . Social Services comes your house and your child is taken away.”

Shades of the New World Order. CLAS, like the recently disavowed “whole language” teaching method, may well have fallen short on educational merit. But the debate was driven by the ravings that are often inspired when religion and politics collide.

Pricer, for example, is a former pastor of Antelope Valley Springs of Life Ministries, known for its crusade against civil rights for gays. Much anti-CLAS propaganda was circulated by Christians convinced they were doing God’s work.

All of which dismayed Wilda Andrejcik, mother of five, grandmother of 14, and a minority vote on the Antelope Valley School Board. She read CLAS and came away convinced that opponents “just wanted to make an issue.”

The Christian right, she warns, has its own agenda--to promote private schools by damaging public education.

And Billy Pricer, meanwhile, is running for the state Assembly.

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Strange, isn’t it? The CLAS controversy was raging, but right there in the Antelope Valley a K-8 school district with 13,000 students was routinely asking parents about breast-feeding and bed-wetting.

Yet nobody waved the form and declared: “Look at this! It’s true! The schools are invading our privacy! Big Brother’s out to get us!”

Nope, not a one. Makes you wonder. Were the roots of this sagebrush rebellion that deep, or was this a victory for the politics of paranoia?