Educators Embrace Opinion on Speakers

One day after announcing that the county Board of Education’s conservative majority had lost an effort to regulate speakers at teacher workshops, board members said Wednesday that a legal opinion could actually give them some control over training sessions.

California Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren issued a legal opinion last week concluding that the county superintendent of schools can select speakers for teacher training programs on such topics as sex education and AIDS prevention.

But the opinion also states that the county board can “withhold approval of such a program based upon the selections made by the superintendent.”

Board members Marty Bates, Angela Miller and Wendy Larner voted last year to bar AIDS Care and Planned Parenthood from teacher training workshops organized by the county superintendent of schools office. But the group said they would make the suspension temporary until they had received Lungren’s opinion.

“We’re back to Square 1,” said Bates, the board president. “What we asked for is the ability to approve who the speakers are. [The opinion] indicated that we do have the authority.”

Bates said if the board’s majority did not approve of a speaker, Supt. Charles Weis would have to select alternative presenters.

But Weis said he does not believe the opinion gives the board such veto power. Once the board decides that the superintendent of schools office can provide sex-education or HIV/AIDS prevention workshops for teachers at the school districts, the board cannot reject speakers, Weis said.

“Their job is not to censor the workshops that school district teachers get,” Weis said. “We will listen to school districts and if they ask us to use certain speakers, we will.”

The state attorney general’s office did not return calls for comment Thursday.