Board rejects Leece’s call to omit novels

Danette Goulet

NEWPORT-MESA -- Four textbooks in question, including two novels

deemed risque by trustee Wendy Leece, on Tuesday were approved for

students by a solid majority of the school board.

“I really think our 12th-grade students can sort through what they

think is proper behavior,” trustee Serene Stokes said. “I don’t think one

book is going to change their values. I don’t want to deprive one student

of the opportunity to read a book.”

Stokes was one of five board members to vote in favor of the books.

Leece and board President David Brooks dissented.

As with any school book, parents retain the right to keep the titles

off their children’s reading assignments if they are uncomfortable with

the material, district officials said.

That assurance did not stop nearly a dozen parents from telling board

members they did not want these books approved.

“I think you have overstepped the bounds of decency with these two

books,” said Barbara Whitacre, a grandmother. “These were award-winning

books, but for adults not for high school students.”

The books were pulled from the secondary textbook list last month

before it was approved by the Newport-Mesa Unified School District board.

Two of the books were pulled at the request of Leece, who deemed their

content unfit for students to read because of the novels’ “graphic sexual

content.”

She asked that “Of Love and Shadows,” by South American author Isabel

Allende, and “Snow Falling on Cedars,” by David Guterson, be reconsidered

before they were approved by board members.

Of the other two books the board voted on, only one was a novel,

“French Lieutenant’s Woman,” by John Fowles.

The other was a sociology textbook.

The three novels are intended for junior and senior composition and

literature courses at Newport Harbor High School.

Jaime Castellanos, the district’s assistant superintendent of

secondary education, spoke on behalf of teachers from Newport Harbor who

wished to defend their choice of novels.

A student also defended the novels to the school board.

“The fact is that I know what sex is. My fellow students know what sex

is,” said Madeline Levy, a senior at Corona del Mar High School. “Rather

than looking at it as adult situations, look at us as 16-, 17- and

18-year-olds entering the world.”

Having read the books, most school board members needed no additional

convincing.

“‘Of Love and Shadows,’ I was reading some of those passages to my

wife and we were laughing,” trustee Jim Ferryman said. “It was one of

those flowery things. It didn’t go into graphics. There’s 1 million

novels out there like that. I think a junior or senior in high school can

certainly handle it.”

It is not the first time Leece has voted against the use of books nor

asked that a book be removed.

In the past, she has objected to profanity and science textbook

presentations of evolution as fact instead of theory.