When Zealots Wage War - resolving conflict and spurious attacks from unpopular decisions

School Administrator, Feb, 1997 by Bruce L. Dennis

About three weeks later, the reports came back from the mental health professionals. None of them sustained the contentions that the game was harmful to children or should be prohibited on school grounds. Consequently, on April 19, 22 days after the start of the moratorium, I recommended to the board of education that the ban on the game be lifted and that students whose parents rendered informed consent be permitted to resume playing the game.

At the board meeting, the two parents who had originally complained, armed with bibles in hand, urged the board not to permit the game to continue in our schools. The board, to its credit, supported my recommendation and the game activities resumed. Before leaving the board meeting, one of the parents came up to me, thrust her finger in my face, and threatened, 'You haven't heard the last of this. I'm going to bring you down as the superintendent who promoted Satanism in the schools."

Bizarre Actions

As one might expect, these parents did not go away. They formed an organization called the Association Against the Seduction of Children. After being granted permission and paying the standard facility use fee to conduct a meeting in one of our schools, the group invited "experts" from around the nation, many of them clergy who were said to be authorities on Satanism and the occult, to speak about the "horrible damage" the Bedford schools were doing to their children. About 200 people attended the meeting on Sept. 28, 1995, but only a handful were from our school district.

In addition, throughout the fall of 1995, the two parents lodged a full frontal assault against all aspects of our school district curriculum. They went to the television and print media to "expose" district practices to which they took exception. This resulted in television and radio coverage by stations in New York City and news stories in The New York Times, New York Daily News, and virtually all of our local print and broadcast media in Westchester County. On the Sunday before Halloween, I even heard a report on my car radio on the local CBS station that the Bedford Central School District had changed the name of Halloween to "The Day of the Dead." One of the two, in an interview, made this ridiculous assertion, which the radio station promptly reported without seeking any confirmation from school district officials.

The two parents wrote letters to our principals seeking that their children be excluded from instructional practices to which they took exception. Their complaints became wide ranging and increasingly bizarre. Their targets included the middle school's use of "Decision Making: Sixth Grade Students Program," developed by the department of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and the Community Consultation Board to equip young adolescents with the skills to make good personal choices.

They also challenged the Drug and Alcohol Resistance Education program, better known as DARE, which is part of our fifth-grade curriculum to comply with New York State's required policy of drug and alcohol education. They objected to the study of owl pellets, a research-based science activity that actively engages students in the nature and methods of science by providing opportunities for careful observation and analysis of data and hypothesis formation. The activity is endorsed by science teaching organizations across the country. They attacked various homework assignments and literature selections, including Bridge to Terabithia, a Newberry Medal-winning children's novel by Katherine Patterson, which also was recognized as a "notable children's book" by the American Library Association and a "best book" by the School Library Journal, and My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, another Newberry Honor Book and winner of the Hans Christian Andersen International Award.