Values and Victories : Education: Beleaguered family life teacher Maya Decker wasn’t on the ballot, but she claims vindication in the results. Two school board candidates opposed to her sex education lessons were defeated.

NEWPORT BEACH —  First, teacher Maya Decker says she was falsely accused on a religious radio show of hypnotizing four students in her family life class at Corona del Mar High School.

Next, some parents charged that condoms were passed out during one of her lectures for students to take home--a charge that was denied by school officials, who interviewed students.

Then, there was the condom demonstration. Decker used a banana. It got the attention of some parents, she admits, including the founder of a traditional values group who demanded that the school board discipline her.

“Things really hit the fan. I’ve never heard the end of it,” Decker said. “It became a red herring. I don’t think the banana is a big problem, especially when people are dying of AIDS. If they want to feel victorious about getting the banana out of the classroom, great.”

For more than a year, Decker, 47, has been under fire by religious and conservative political groups who maintain that the family life class she has taught for eight years serves impressionable children “a philosophical agenda that destroys values and divides families.”

Her class also found its way into the school board campaign that culminated with Tuesday’s election. Although Decker’s name was not on the ballot, she clearly emerged a winner.

She believes she was effectively vindicated when incumbents in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District board race defeated two challengers who wanted to overhaul the district’s sex education program, including her family life class.

“The board election was very important,” Decker said after school one day last week, shortly before embarking on her usual five-mile hike to relax. “I wanted the community at large to say they supported the program, and they did.”

Family life, an optional course at Corona del Mar High School, has been taught for almost 20 years. Its comprehensive lesson plan now addresses personal relationships, dating, marriage, parenting, child development, human sexuality, contraception, abortion, abstinence and sexually transmitted diseases.

Decker, who is president of the Orange County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and an active member and former head of the 700-member Newport Mesa Teachers Federation, claims her critics are ignorant about her class. She brings in a wide variety of guest speakers, including homosexuals, pro-choice and anti-abortion advocates, contraception experts, family law attorneys and married couples with babies.

District officials say the course is designed to prepare high school students for adulthood and provide them with a broad range of information so they can make informed decisions and cope with today’s world.

To take Decker’s class, students need permission from their parents, who can review course materials a week before school begins. About 70 students enroll in her two courses every semester.

“I feel what I teach are survival skills--relationship survival skills,” said Decker, who has taught for 23 years, almost all of it in Room 246 at Corona del Mar. “I get positive feedback, extremely positive feedback from parents and students.”

There are exceptions, however. Some parents and members of the Committee to Restore Ethical and Traditional Education (CREATE), a traditional values group based in Costa Mesa, want her class replaced or revamped to teach abstinence and refusal techniques almost exclusively.

CREATE’s literature states that Decker’s family life course, as well as other sex education classes in the district, shock or entice students “into the abyss of an ‘anything goes’ world of amoral social behavior.”

She’s “an aberration of the system,” said John Gustafson, a founder of CREATE. “They say to the students, ‘I know you are going to have sex, here’s the contraceptives, and you can get an abortion.’ I bet Decker has not taught a refusal technique in her life.”

Gustafson earlier this year called on the school board to discipline Decker when a guest speaker from UC Irvine also used a banana in her class to demonstrate a condom. District administrators said the banana had to go.

In the school board election, the group backed candidates Wendy Leece of Costa Mesa and Jo Ellen Allen of Corona del Mar, who called for an abstinence-based sex education program and a school board that was more responsive to parents’ concerns. Both were defeated.

CREATE and its followers began monitoring Decker’s class last spring, using students and adult observers for three consecutive days. Some them did not have children in the class.

Decker said the visits created “a three-ring-circus atmosphere” and she fought back by taping her lectures and inviting a Newport Mesa Federation of Teachers representative and an administrator into her classes. She said none of the observers confronted her face to face with their complaints.

This week, the school board will take action to adopt a formal policy restricting the type of visits members of CREATE have sought.

“They come in and pick the most titillating stuff and not the other information which is the bulk of the course,” Decker said. “They read sinister intent into the most simple things. They have a narrow perspective that is not representative of the Christian community.”

CREATE’s founder responded that outsiders have been turned away from her class and the district has not honored promises to turn over class material.

“They are clearly ashamed of what’s going on. If they were not ashamed, they would let people in. . . . We have not been disruptive,” Gustafson said.

The controversy surrounding Decker began last year when a student complained to his parents that four classmates had been hypnotized in her class as well as in a psychology class.

The purported incident was recounted on a radio broadcast by Focus on the Family, a Pomona-based religious organization, in September, 1988. Included in the program was a reading of what was taught in the human sexuality sequence of Decker’s course, which represents one of six units of course material.

“We don’t even talk about hypnosis in the class,” Decker said.

The students, Decker and Corona del Mar High School were not named on the show, said Paul Hetrick, vice president of Focus on the Family.

The radio report was followed by the latest banana controversy, charges that Decker’s class promotes homosexuality, questions about condoms being distributed, and demands by CREATE members and other parents that Decker drop certain topics from her class.

Although she did not agree with the decision, the district removed a lecture on human sexual response.

Decker, an avid bird-watcher and board member of the Audubon Society, hikes five miles almost every day in the countryside near her Laguna Niguel home.

She is a theatergoer. Sometimes, she says, it reminds her of the controversy surrounding her. Last spring when CREATE followers were clamoring to get into her classroom, she saw the Arthur Miller play “The Crucible” at South Coast Repertory.

The drama explores the infamous witch hunts that ravaged the Puritan community in Salem, Mass., during the last decade of the 17th Century.

“Orange County is Salem, Mass., in 1692,” Decker quipped.