PTA Not Happy About Birthday Greeting for Fox

A newspaper advertisement partly paid for by Mayor Andy Fox’s campaign manager and attributed to the “PTA/PFA Day Volunteers” has angered Conejo Valley PTA leaders, who say the ad was grossly misleading.

The two-thirds-page ad, which appeared last week in a local newspaper, congratulates Fox for his birthday, and thanks him “for a year full of integrity, energy, professionalism, grit, compassion, humor and hard work.”

But Alice Humbertson, president of the Conejo Valley PTA Council, said the ad fails to mention that it was paid for in part by Jill Lederer, Fox’s campaign manager. More to the point, it does not explain that the “PTA/PFA Day Volunteers” are actually a committee of school volunteers honored by Fox during one of his fund-raisers earlier this year--a group not in any way affiliated with the parent-teacher associations or parent-faculty associations, as many readers surely believed, Humbertson said.

“It was an unfortunate choice,” Humbertson said. “The committee has nothing to do with the PTA, absolutely nothing. I hope it was not done on purpose. I really hope this was a mistake.”

Lederer said she and some members of PTA/PFA Day Volunteers paid for the ad to honor Fox for taking the money he acquired in the “Andy Fox PTA/PFA Day” fund-raiser earlier this year and donating $250 to every Thousand Oaks school.

She said it was not intended to mislead anyone, and added that she does not believe it misrepresents the truth.

“We thought we put it on there very clearly, ‘PTA/PFA Day Volunteers,’ ” Lederer said. “I think if people don’t understand who was involved, it’s probably because they did not read the ad closely.

“It’s very unfortunate that someone would want to politicize this,” she added. “This is someone who is doing a lot of good things in the community, and that’s why we did this.”

Humbertson said she is concerned that the PTA’s reputation in Thousand Oaks will suffer from the ad, since as nonprofit groups, the associations are not supposed to engage in politics. Already, she said, some PTA members at Thousand Oaks High School have complained that local businesses have refused to give them money because of the political nature of the of the ad.

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To clear up the misconceptions the ad has created, Humbertson is writing a form letter that will be read by PTA members at all upcoming Conejo Valley back-to-school events. She is also worried that the ad could affect PTA membership.

“I’ve had calls from parents and schools, questioning what this ad means,” Humbertson said. “Technically, the ad is correct: there is a PTA/PFA Day Volunteers committee.

“But the problem it has created is that people see the words PTA there, and they think we paid for that and/or endorse Andy Fox,” she added. “And neither is true.”

The fallout surrounding the ad is the second flap to stem from Fox’s annual fund-raisers to benefit his officeholder’s account, a discretionary fund intended to finance the cost of holding office.

The first event, a charity golf tournament held last year, was roundly criticized by Fox’s political opponents for failing to make clear that the money being raised would go toward Fox’s office-holder’s account, not directly to various charities.

Fox defended the fund-raiser, pointing out that he later gave the money to charities and community organizations.

Fox, who is not up for reelection until 1998, said the latest controversy was much ado about nothing.

He believes few people are actually upset, judging from the fact that no one has called him to complain. He charged that the negative response to the ad was engineered by his political opponents.

“Let’s face it, we have some people in the PTA who are not Andy Fox supporters, and they are trying to rub my face in the mud here,” Fox said.

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Fox stressed that if he had known about the birthday ad, he would have advised Lederer and his volunteers to write it differently to avoid what he sees as opportunistic political attacks. He said he does not see why PTA members should be angry, since the ad was not an endorsement.

“I got a bit of a problem with that, because we [had] a lot of PTA volunteers out at our event,” Fox said. “They were not there on behalf of the PTA to endorse me. They were just there.”

But Susan Witting, the PTA president at Los Cerritos Middle School, said most readers have no idea what “PTA/PFA Day Volunteers” means. All they see is Andy Fox and PTA, and they jump to what seems like the logical conclusion: The PTA supports Fox.

“This was not the PTA, this was some of his campaign workers, and we just want people to understand that,” said Witting, who has received about 10 calls from her members wondering about the ad. “The PTA cannot support political candidates, and we want to get the word out that we haven’t done that here, that there’s been a mistake.”