Lights go out at Mariners Elementary

Danette Goulet

NEWPORT BEACH -- Mariners Elementary School parents have taken down

strings of colored and white lights at the request of school board

president Dana Black, although there has been little to no opposition in

the community to the display.

“It’s a public building,” Black said. “Our school parents do a really

good job of ringing in the holidays, but it’s a public building and

lights have no place there.”

When Black was at a grocery store Saturday afternoon, a resident who

lives in the Mariners neighborhood stopped her to let her know that “they

were at it again,” Black said.

Black called one of the parents she knew was out at the school that

afternoon working on the grounds and asked him to unplug the lights.

Parents did so, but called it a shame.

“By no means was it trying to make a statement,” said Graham Tingler,

the parent who strung the lights while he and several other parents and

students were fixing school sprinklers, planting grass and painting trim

Saturday. “We were just trying to be festive and make it a place we can

be proud of.”

After hearing from Black, parents immediately removed the strings of

colored lights from the kindergarten area and office, but left the white

lights.

Leaders of various Jewish groups, including Mali Leitner, past

president of the Jewish Community Center in Costa Mesa; Rabbi Marc

Rubenstein, of Temple Isaiah in Newport Beach; and Joyce Greenspan,

regional director of the Orange County and Long Beach Anti-Defamation

League, said they do not see a problem with parents stringing white

lights around a campus olive tree.

Rubenstein said lights are not specific to Christianity, noting that

Hanukkah is the Festival of Lights.

Leitner said she decorates her own lawn for Hanukkah with blue and

white lights.

“The law is fairly specific but gets gray when one looks at

decorations,” Greenspan said. “By law, certain decorations are secular

and not religious. White lights fall under the category of secular. It’s

just like the tree in the White House -- a Christmas tree on public

property is OK.”

Both Newport Beach and Costa Mesa city halls have at least one

Christmas tree up, along with various other decorations.

The league does ask, however, that people be sensitive to how these

things make non-Christians feel, Greenspan said.

“I think that what happens within a community that is not Christian is

they feel disenfranchised,” she said. “There may be a sense of discomfort

with what the school is doing, but it can not be construed as illegal,

and they don’t have to come down.”

Although there is no district policy on secular decorations, Supt.

Robert Barbot stressed that the district wants to be sensitive to

everyone in the community.

“We try at our school sites to stress to them, please don’t do

anything to offend a particular group,” he said.

And Rabbi Mark S. Miller of Temple Bat Yam said that while lights are

used in all religions, strings of electrical lights are part of the

Christmas celebration.

“I just think that it is a provocative act because there are many

non-Christians that do not share the sentiment that Jesus is the light of

the world, which is what the lights represent,” Miller said. “It’s not

just a holiday, it’s a religious commemoration. There are many people who

do not share in that belief system, so the lights are not neutral or

innocent. To me, they symbolize a religious expression, and I think

students who don’t share in that expression are marginalized and made to

feel like others and not part of the circle of observance.”

But it is now parents who say they are beginning to feel

disenfranchised by the school district, which they said should spend more

time worrying about textbooks for students and why the parents were out

there planting grass on a Saturday in the first place, Tingler said.

“At some point, the parents who care and the parents who want to make

their school a better place are going to be tired of getting kicked in

the face and go volunteer elsewhere,” he added.