(Chatelaine)
It's a fight over three slim storybooks. But it has sparked a bitter
values clash in Surrey, B.C. At issue: characters Asha, Daniel, Lou
and their same-sex parents. Some say the books help fight discrimination.
Others say they underage a parent's right to teach that homosexuality
is wrong.
A scuffle erupted as the students in James Chamberlain's Grade 1
class at Latimer Road Elementary School in the Vancouver suburb of
Surrey lined up at the door in preparation for their daily march down
the hall to the gym. A girl was teasing two boys, goading them to
kiss one another. One of the boys grew agitated and shouted loudly
enough for everyone in line to hear that there was no way he'd ever
do that, only gays do that!
It was what modern educators like to describe as a "teachable moment,
" and Chamberlain seized it. Taking his three students aside, he asked
them, "Do you know what gay means?" One replied, "That's when two
boys kiss each other and it's gross." Chamberlain paused and explained:
"It could also mean when two men or women love each other and raise
a family together. In our classroom we don't know which families might
have two moms or two dads and what you said could be hurtful to someone.
In our classroom, I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't talk like that
because it's not right for us to make fun of people because they have
a different skin colour or come
from different kinds of families."
That was two years ago, before Chamberlain's students, their parents,
his colleagues at Latimer, his superiors in School District No. 36
(Surrey) and at the education ministry in Victoria, along with virtually
everyone else in Canada who follows education news, knew he was gay.
Which is not to say the 35-year-old teacher responded to that little
scuffle because of his own sexual orientation. Nor was that the reason
he spearheaded a drive, later the same year, to have three storybooks
about same-sex families approved for classroom use - a highly charged
campaign that propelled the teacher out of the closet and his school
board into the Supreme Court of British Columbia. Chamberlain was
just trying to do his job, he says, and part of it is to talk to his
students about family diversity.
To understand what is happening in Surrey - and more generally,
what is being taught in schools these days - it is necessary to do
some serious decoding. Family diversity, for example, falls under
the B.C. Ministry of Education's Career and Personal Planning (CAPP)
curriculum, mandated for all public school students from kindergarten
through Grade 12. At the primary level there is a family life education
section whose prescribed learning outcomes include: "Identify a variety
of models for family organization." This is what James Chamberlain
was talking to his students about. And this is what he wanted to read
to them about, believing that stories are picture windows through
which children view the world.
"You can't draw stick people on the board and say this is one kind
of family. It's not the way kids think at that age level. Five- and
6-year-olds are very egocentric - they view the world through their
own little lens, and it's hard for them to understand other points
of view and the concept of bias."
In the old days, few teachers would even attempt a lesson on bias.
It wasn't in the textbook, so it wasn't taught. In the old days, parents
could browse through the texts and get a pretty good idea of what
was in the curriculum - in other words, what their children had to
regurgitate by year-end if they wished to pass the grade. These days,
the word "text" (even "grade") has a quaint sound. "Curriculum" has
largely been replaced by the Integrated Resource Package (IRP). Other
provinces may use other codes, but the IRP concept is standard: a
flexible teaching model in which a raft of learning outcomes are achieved
through discretionary use of workbooks, novels, films, music, art,
computer games, live presentations, field studies and so on. This
is known as resource-based learning and compared to the old study-
and-spew model, there is much to be said for it.
There is also much to be said against it, especially where broadly
mandated social programs such as CAPP and family life are concerned.
And much is being said against it, right across Canada wherever parents
and politicians have banded together to apply the brakes to what they
see as the steady infringement of state-mandated values on parental
rights and beliefs. Nowhere are the brakes squeakier than in Surrey,
where a sizable group of parents and their elected representatives
won't rest until CAPP is gutted. It's not educational progress, they
argue, but self-serving political correctness that doesn't belong
in public classrooms.
James Chamberlain has spent the past two years making the counter-
argument - defending his right to use the three innocuous-looking
storybooks to help his students "identify a variety of models for
family organization." The core of his argument is constitutional,
pitting the Charter of Rights and Freedoms against the powers of democratically
elected officials to decide what can and can't be taught at school.
No small classroom scuffle, this. The landmark case will decide whether
a school board has the power to censor teachers and teaching materials,
and for that reason will be closely watched by educators and parents,
politicians and civil rights activists across the country.
The plots of the three books at issue - Asha's Mums by Rosamund
Elwin and Michele Paulse, One Dad Two Dads Brown Dad Blue Dads by
Johnny Valentine and Belinda's Bouquet by Leslea Newman - all involve
children who live with same-sex parents. In the first, a little girl
named Asha runs into resistance from her teacher when she brings a
field-trip permission note from home, signed by her two mothers. One
Dad Two Dads... is a Seuss-style exploration of multiculturalism in
which a black boy answers a white girl's questions about his blue-
skinned dads. ("Do they work? Do they play? Do they cook? Do they
cough? If they hug you too hard, does the colour rub off?") And Belinda
is a child who is labeled fat by an adult but regains self-esteem
thanks to a friend with two moms. Each of the three books ends with
a positive message designed to counter harmful stereotypes.
The controversy that erupted in 1997 had little if anything to do
with the children in Chamberlain's Grade 1 class or their parents.
Eighteen of the 20 parents who read the books signed a petition in
support of the teacher's effort to have the school board approve them
for classroom use. They liked Chamberlain, their kids adored him and
they agreed with the message he hoped to communicate through the books
- "that love is the glue that holds families together - not the gender
of the parents."
Surrey trustees could not have agreed less, and when Chamberlain
approached them with his request on April 24, 1997, he was handily
voted down. A teacher's job is to teach the curriculum, they argued.
Identifying different family models is one thing, but redefining family
is not a prescribed learning outcome, and attempting to do so in a
primary classroom is likely to confuse children and undermine the
lessons parents were teaching around their own kitchen tables - including,
around some tables, that homosexuality is a sin.
By Vancouver standards, Surrey is a strong churchgoing community
with evangelical congregations among the municipality's fastest growing
and most vocal. They are well represented (overrepresented, say their
opponents) on the school board by a right-wing civic party called
the Surrey Electors Team, whose platform includes a return to the
core curriculum, traditional family values and parental rights - by
which they mean the right of parents to be the primary educators in
the development of attitudes and values of their children. Of the
seven trustees on the board, five belong to this party. Chamberlain
didn't stand a chance.
And so the war began. "Surrey school board bans three children's
books, ran the BCTV news item later that night, showing footage of
a shouting match that had broken out in the school board chamber between
opposing groups of parents. Accusations of censorship and discrimination
issued from the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. The provincial New
Democrats cried foul: "Burning books is not a solution," Premier Glen
Clark told The Vancouver Sun. Education Minister Paul Ramsey described
the board's action as "beyond belief" and issued a thinly veiled threat
to fire the trustees. Chamberlain, backed by the gay-rights group
GALE (Gay and Lesbian Educators of B.C.), rallied support locally
and across Canada, opening a Web site called Bigots Ban Books to document
the ensuing battle and solicit contributions to the Surrey Schools
Banned-Book Defence Fund.
In typically broad strokes, the headlines suggest a battle between
good guys and bad: liberals versus rednecks, progressive teachers
versus bigoted censors. In fact, it is not nearly so clearcut. For
one thing, there are more than two sides in this battle. While the
activists and trustees have openly declared their agendas, parents'
and teachers' groups have lined up here, there and down the centre.
No side can lay clear claim to strength in numbers, though they've
tried - commissioning polls whose methods and results remain questionable.
Just how well the trustees reflect their constituents is also in question;
voter turnout for the civic election in 1996 was less than 30 percent.
There are parents who support the books but feel GALE is taking advocacy
too far in this case. There are teachers who back Chamberlain's professional
judgment but wouldn't have made the same call in their own classrooms.
Hardest to pin down is the government, a slippery third force in
this battle. The New Democrats launched CAPP three years ago but have
clearly failed to give the program legs. While the premier and education
minister were fast to condemn the trustees' decision on the three
books, they have offered little explanation for their policy on resource
approval, which is arguably what set Chamberlain up against the trustees
in the first place. Provincial policy requires all classroom resources
to be approved either at the ministry or district level and officials
in Victoria are extremely cautious about what gets the green light.
Only three storybooks were (and still are) on the ministry list for
kindergarten and Grade 1 for the family, life and education part of
the personal development program, and they are innocuous to a fault.
The officially approved My Puppy Is Born, for example, makes Asha'
s Mums look like a bodice ripper. My Puppy Is Born doesn't shed much
light in discussions of family diversity.
Chamberlain describes the ministry's policy as two parts expediency,
one part education. The politicians know how far they can go on social
reform - and in the past few years the B.C. New Democrats have gone
farther than any other provincial government in granting pension,
adoption and family-support fights to same-sex couples. They also
know the limits of voter support and when it comes to education, they'
ve evidently reached it. "Schools are a big hot button now," says
Chamberlain, who notes that Education Minister Ramsey was openly critical
of the Surrey school board before he came close to losing his seat
in a recall campaign fueled by angry right-wing voters. Since then,
he's been mostly silent.
His staff has been, well, cautious. The ministry's manager of curriculum
standards, David Williams, says the reason this issue is so sensitive
is the risk that a classroom discussion of differences might turn
into a validation of different choices. There is nothing about correctness
or validation of different family models in the kindergarten-to-Grade
1 curriculum, he told me. It's the same with different races or religions:
"We do not list the particular religions that people should be accepting
of, because as soon as you start listing things, you exclude other
things."
That's sheer hypocrisy, charges Chamberlain. "I've got a letter
from David Williams saying the exact opposite - that every model of
family must be validated, and it lists them all and it includes same-
sex." Validation is a touchstone for the activist teachers and their
supporters. "Kids from same-sex families have to be totally accepted
in our schools," says Chamberlain. "Right now their lives are not
reflected in the resources we use and they're attacked all the time.
They have to be secret to survive
the system, and that's not fair."
But the contest between the teachers and the ministry amounted to
a mere skirmish compared to the ensuing hostilities with the Surrey
school board. It unfolded as a holy war, thanks in large part to the
rhetoric of Robert Pickering, then chairman of the school board and
a member of the Surrey Electors Team. In the months preceding the
vote on the three books, Pickering had made clear his antipathy to
a B.C. Teachers Federation proposal to develop an antihomophobia program
for the province's schools. Describing it as "a front to recruit children
into homosexuality," Picketing vowed to "fight it with all I've got...
If they make it mandatory, then it's war." The federation was in bed
with GALE, in Pickering's view, and in early April, on learning that
GALE counseling resources were circulating in district schools, he
tabled a resolution informing all staff that "resources from gay and
lesbian groups such as GALE or their related resources lists are not
approved for use or redistribution in the Surrey school district."
It passed in a 5-2 vote.
There's no question the Surrey Electors Team trustees are their
own worst public-relations enemies. Many parents who oppose the use
of Asha's Mums and the other storybooks are offended by Pickering'
s gay-baiting rhetoric and by his colleagues' apparent disdain for
sex education. In resolution after resolution, the trustees have chipped
away at all the sexual health programs previously given in the district
and still available in most others. Planned Parenthood is no longer
welcome in Surrey classrooms, public health nurses can't discuss sexually
transmitted diseases and a plan to install condom machines in school
washrooms - though supported by parental referendum - was overturned.
Chamberlain's defence forces have been shored up by many parents
who have never set eyes on the three books but who don't like the
direction the board is going - parents who basically don't trust their
trustees. The outside affiliations of people such as Picketing and
current board chairwoman Heather Stilwell speak volumes: both Pickering
and Stilwell have been active in Campaign Life Coalition, whose position
is that "to have become a homosexual is to have acquired a moral disorder"
and whose goals include exclusion of gays in the military and the
clergy. Pickering has been a director of the Citizen's Research Institute,
which has declared itself against schools teaching that homosexuality
is "normal, acceptable or must be tolerated." Stilwell is a founder
and former leader of the provincially registered Christian Heritage
Party, which advocates recriminalizing sexual deviancy and abolishing
the Charter of Rights. While the trustees are gutting sexual health
programs, Stilwell has urged district staff to attend a panel discussion
called Facts About Homosexuality sponsored by Christian organizations
that favour cure-oriented counseling of youth who have been "recruited
into the homosexual lifestyle."
Such rhetoric strikes fear in the hearts of many Surrey parents
who are feeling increasingly alienated from their elected officials
and are beginning to wonder about the toll such a war of words might
take on their children and on Surrey's reputation. "This is a wonderful
multicultural place; that's why we moved here," says Diane Willcott,
the mother of a boy who was in Chamberlain's class at Latimer Road
Elementary. "But we have very narrow-minded public officials who are
only representing a religious minority. That's what this is about:
keeping religion out of the schools and keeping special interest groups
out. We also have white supremacists in Surrey - are we going to support
their values in our schools too?"
Last spring, Willcott jumped into the fray with a few like-minded
parents, launching a group called Heterosexuals Exposing Paranoia.
Their goal was to counter what they saw as sexual hysteria being whipped
up by the trustees. "What do they mean, homosexual lifestyle? Same-
sex families have the same kind of lives that we have," she says.
"They get up every morning, they feed their kids, they drive them
to the hockey rink."
The battle moved to the B.C. Supreme Court early in the summer of
1997, with five petitioners issuing a joint challenge to the school
board on their book resolution as well as the GALE decision. The five
were: James Chamberlain; Diane Willcott; Murray Warren, a gay teacher
in the Coquitlam school district and an active member of GALE; Rosamund
Elwin, coauthor of Asha's Mums; and Blain Cook, a Surrey student who
has experienced harassment in his high school. They were supported
by the national organization EGALE (Equality for Gays and Lesbians
Everywhere) and by the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, which acted
as collection agency for the defence fund. Sixty affidavits were entered
as evidence by the petitioners, including harsh criticism of the book
ban from renowned developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan of Harvard
University.
The petitioners retained Victoria lawyer Joseph Array, who is well
known for another anticensorship case - the long-running battle between
Vancouver's Little Sister's Bookstore and Canada Customs over the
seizure of books at the U.S. border. Both resolutions, argued Arvay,
represented clear violations of the constitutional rights of minority
families in Surrey. In saying no to all GALE resources, the board
robbed gay teachers and students, and children who live in same-sex
families, of their rights to equality and to freedom of expression.
In saying no to the three books, he said, the board "has rendered
the gay and lesbian people in the district invisible."
The resolutions are also in violation of our freedom of religion,
said Array, and that includes freedom from religion. Almost everyone
who opposes homosexuality does so on religious grounds, he argued,
and religion has no place in a public school. While a school board
must strive to represent its constituency, it cannot do so in violation
of the constitution or the Human Rights Code. Parents who believe
homosexuality is evil "are entitled to hold those beliefs and even
attempt to inculcate them in their children," Array said. "However,
they have no right to impose them on the other people in the Surrey
school district."
It was a sweeping argument and the petitioners hoped Justice Mary
Saunders would accept it, signaling to school boards across the country
that it would never again be legitimate to ban books simply because
they portray homosexuality in a positive light. This would not mean
all books with gay themes or characters must be approved for school
use, Arvay said. Some would not be age-appropriate, "but the central
point of this case is that books cannot be held to be age-inappropriate
simply because they deal with homosexuality."
The school board also came up with 60 affidavits to defend its position,
many from educational experts who questioned the value of the books
precisely because of their age-appropriateness. Fred Renihan, superintendent
of schools for the district, believes it's all about age. There is
a crucial difference between discussing same-sex families in Grade
10 (at which time the subject is clearly prescribed by the ministry
as part of CAPP) and teaching it in kindergarten to Grade 1. At the
primary level, he told the court, such lessons carry the potential
to disrupt a healthy partnership between schools and parents.
Validation of individual belief systems cuts both ways - which is,
in effect, what many parents wrote in support of the board's position.
Those who see the books as a tool to fight discrimination do not have
a monopoly on this particular moral touchstone. Children who have
been taught that families properly spring from married mothers and
fathers also deserve to be validated by teachers, say these parents,
not all of whom are religious. Those who are religious tend to take
the stronger stand - that children must not be challenged in their
belief that homosexuality is a sin. Nor should they be given the idea
their parents are bigots.
Mary Polak leans back in her boardroom chair in the Surrey school
district office and takes a deep breath. The legal arguments are over,
the waiting period begun. Despite her ready smile, the 30-year-old
trustee and member of the Surrey Electors Team is looking just a little
worn out. Brian Bastien, associate superintendent for the district,
is also at the table. He too looks fired and somewhat annoyed. They
are describing their defence against the petitioners' harsh accusations,
insisting they have been misrepresented, misunderstood. They are
not bigots and nothing has been banned, they tell me. The first resolution
was not to exclude resources from GALE, says Polak, but to inform
district staff that these resources have not yet been approved by
the district's fledgling CAPP advisory committee (a group of mostly
parents and teachers responsible for approving sensitive resources).
The second resolution was a response to pressure from members of GALE
and the Surrey Teachers Association who were anxious to have the books
approved and didn't care to wait for the CAPP committee to get rolling.
Though she maintains the board was within its fights to approve or
disapprove of the resources under the B.C. School Act, Polak now admits
this may have been a political mistake. By yielding to the pressure,
they walked into a trap.
Polak suggests it was strategic for the teachers to push the Surrey
board for approvals they knew they would not get, thus laying the
foundation for the court challenge they really wanted - one that would
obscure the relevant classroom issues under the rhetoric of book bans
and censorship. If the trustees are guilty of rhetoric, so are the
activists, she insists, and they're loading their cannons in this
case not only to force the ministry's hand but to turn heads nationwide.
They targeted Surrey because it is the second-largest school district
in the province, next to Vancouver, and with its fast rate of growth
will likely be the largest within a few years. "Obviously it wouldn'
t carry as much weight if they approved [the books] in Spuzzum," says
Polak.
Politics is overshadowing common sense, says Bastien. He knows of
no district in the province that has approved these resources for
classroom use, the ministry has not approved them, yet Surrey has
been tarred and feathered for not approving them. Accusations of bigotry
and cries of censorship only distract from the real issue, he says,
which is age. "You've got a 5-year-old who can't even tie up his
shoes," says Bastien. "And now are you going to tell him about the
correctness and only the correctness as perceived by one [person]?
Or are you going to get into two views?"
Like most districts in B.C. and across the rest of Canada, Surrey
has antiharassment policies to protect the rights and physical safety
of all students and staff. "We want to deal with behaviour, whether
it's bullying, whether it's racial, whether it's sexual orientation,
" Bastien says. "All of those things, we're together on. But when
you start to tell people how they should believe, that becomes a contentious
issue that is best resolved by the elected officials."
Elected officials across Canada have struggled with the same contentious
issue, but there is no such thing as a solution to satisfy all sides.
In Calgary, the public school board came under fire from a parental-
rights group for an antiharassment plan that included supportive in-
school counseling for gay students. The group, believing homosexuality
should not be supported as a healthy lifestyle at school or anywhere
else, won concessions in the plan, allowing parents to exempt their
children. Similarly, in Toronto, gay-rights advocates have made slow
progress at best Though trustees are proud of their Challenging Homophobia
program at the Toronto Board of Education, which includes workshops
offered to students from Grade 4 up, activists have not made inroads
on provincial curriculum.
Diane Willcott and her fellow Supreme Court petitioners believe
a large part of the solution lies in breaking the Surrey Electors
Team monopoly on the Surrey school board. As a member of the district'
s parent advisory council, Willcott has observed the trustees in action
over the past few years and accuses them of poisoning the atmosphere
with their fundamentalist politics. Banning resources designed to
help students Willcott describes as "the most vulnerable in the system"
is the last straw, she says. It's sexual hysteria disguised as family
values, and it's way out of control.
It remains unclear whether this conflict will ever be solved at
the ballot box or in a courtroom. What is clear is how much damage
has already been done. "I'm going to be much more nervous about what
I'm doing in the classroom than I ever was before," Vicky Bradbury
told me a few weeks before the start of the fall term at the Surrey
high school where she teaches. For the past two years, the CAPP teacher
was seconded by the ministry to coordinate implementation of the Career
and Personal Planning programs for the region, which makes her an
expert on CAPP and an advocate of its power to support learning. But
given what has transpired in the past two years, she is no longer
sure she can teach it. With zealous trustees, nervous administrators
and suspicious parents looking over their shoulders, her colleagues
are "living in fear" of teaching CAPP in Surrey.
"They've had to submit every guest speaker for approval, every community
resource. Many of them are afraid to teach any unapproved resource
- all you need is to hear one parent complain about something and
your life is in misery," says Bradbury. "Back in the old days, which
wasn't so long ago," she says, speaking of the time before Asha's
Mums triggered a holy war, "you
could just use whatever you wanted."
It maybe too late to go back and that may not be such a good idea.
The good old days never really were. Life has always been as complex,
as challenging and as dangerous for children as it is today - if
in different ways. The Three Rs have never been enough to send students
on their way through life. Values, for better or worse, have always
been part of what's passed along in the classroom. And there never
was a time of sacred trust between teachers and parents. It was more
like benign neglect and remains so for many of today's busy parents
who are content knowing their children will be blessed with some good
teachers, cursed with some bad ones, and with any luck will emerge
at least a bit smarter in the end.
The truth is that in the old days, people like James Chamberlain
were likely to be hailed as model teachers. Hardworking, idealistic
and creative, they proved themselves to be worthy of the trust they
earned from their students and the respect they received from those
few parents who were paying attention.
Trust is the big casualty in this baffle. Though Chamberlain has
earned it at his school, he struggles to understand why things have
become so polarized. He insists the problem lies far away from his
classroom, where the compact between teacher and student is alive
and well. He is a professional, after all. He is governed by the B.C.
Teachers Federation code of ethics and never has broken the rules
and never would, he tells me. "You can't use your classroom for ideological
advantage. You can't indoctrinate. If I were to talk about families,
and only talked about same-sex families, then yes, I am using the
classroom for the wrong purpose and I can be disciplined. My job is
to talk about all kinds of families, irrespective of whether some
families in the community are uncomfortable with some models."
If it's the irrespective that is causing all the grief, Chamberlain
is prepared to live with that. There are many lessons that need to
be taught in schools today, he says, to help children puzzle their
way through life. The ministry agrees with him there and has developed
the CAPP program for this very purpose. Unfortunately, they haven'
t attached the book list that would support such an ambitious program
and are powerless to influence districts that seem intent on removing
all such supports. In those troubled districts, teachers have no alternative
but to improvise - at their own risk.
Bookless, Chamberlain improvises at the blackboard. He teaches 5-
and 6-year-olds about the folly of sexual stereotypes, for instance,
by drawing a Venn diagram on the board: in this circle well list
all the "things men do" and in that circle are all the "things women
do" and here is where the two circles overlap - and guess what? By
the end of Chamberlain's lesson almost everything is listed in the
overlapping zone.
"My responsibility as a classroom teacher is to make the world a
better place," he tells me. To do so, he will continue to look for
those priceless teachable moments and seize them - with or without
Asha's help. And this is the final irony of the ideological war: no
one can stop James Chamberlain from discussing same-sex families in
his classroom. They can only stop him from reading about them, which
would help but is not absolutely essential to his lesson plan.
Brook, Paula, War over words.(teaching
family diversity in grade school in Surrey, British Columbia). , Chatelaine,
12-01-1998, pp NA.