Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 6, 1993 TAG: 9310060127
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-12 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By Brian Kelley staff writer
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Harold Dodge, who left the post in July after 5 years, writes in an article aimed at school administrators that if confronted by religious fundamentalist candidates preaching radical change, "Doing nothing may be the riskiest course of action."
Dodge co-authored the article, "The Legal Cost of Challenging the Far Right," with Leon F. Szeptycki, a Charlottesville attorney who specializes in education law.
The duo advocate employing proxies such as PTA groups or the League of Women Voters to challenge fundamentalist candidates and unmask their agenda for the school system. They warned administrators to be wary in dealing with "`stealth' candidates - religious fundamentalists who hide their ultraconservative agenda while trying to pass themselves off as mainstream candidates."
Moreover, the two men conclude, the best practice as a superintendent is to keep parents of students and other voters well informed about everything that is happening in their school system.
"The alarm bells sounded by a fundamentalist candidate will go unheard by a parent who really knows what goes on in his or her child's classroom."
Now a Charlottesville-based educational consultant, Dodge was superintendent during last year's months-long controversy over the use of secular names to refer to the public school holidays that occur around Christmas and Easter.
Dodge said that experience, which resulted in the resignation of School Board Chairman Daniel Schneck, in part motivated the article.
"There was one small group that was just really fanatical," Dodge said. In the wake of that controversy, a future bid by fundamentalists to control an elected school board in Montgomery is a possibility, Dodge said.
The Northern Virginia-based American Association of School Administrators had earlier asked Dodge to help formulate a pamphlet on religious issues in the public schools.
The article published in this month's issue of "The School Administrator," combines that work with Szeptycki's explanation of how key court cases from 1968 and 1992 limit a school administrator's First Amendment rights to speak out against potential school board members.
The issue is relevant locally because the issue of electing Montgomery County School Board members, who are now appointed by the elected Board of Supervisors, is on next month's ballot. If a majority of county voters approve, the first school board election will occur in November 1995.
In the wake of the contentious holiday-name issue, which the School Board settled in April by sticking with the secular names, religious-name advocates conducted a petition drive to get the elected school board question on the ballot and promised their "majority" opinion would be heard.
The issue also sparked the formation of group called the Coalition for Community that supported the secular names. They co-sponsored a forum on the elected school board issue last week at which the only strong proponent for elected boards scheduled to speak, a minister from Salem, did not show.
Current Montgomery School Superintendent Herman G. Bartlett said he included the article in a packet of information for board members because his predecessor had co-authored it.
"It had no particular significance," Bartlett said. "We believe whether [board members] are elected or appointed will not make a great deal of difference as to how they will do the job."
John LeDoux, chairman of the Montgomery chapter of the Christian Coalition, said he agreed with the article on at least one point: That potential School Board candidates should be questioned extensively and their views known by the community. O The coalition, he said, does not nominate or endorse
candidates. As for so-called stealth candidates, "You can apply the same definition of stealth candidates to people on the other side of the fence."
The article by Dodge and Szeptycki lays out the risks to a school administrator in opposing a fundamentalist takeover in no uncertain terms: "If you decide to resist the fundamentalist takeover of your board, you must face the prospect that the candidates you oppose will not be good sports if they win and that firing you will be their first order.
"Unfortunately . . . the First Amendment does not provide the degree of protection you might think."
At bottom, according to the article, is a case-by-case balancing test that courts use to decide if a public employer may discipline an employee for speaking out. Key to superintendents is one of four judicial litmus tests the Supreme Court set up in its 1968 ruling, Pickering vs. Board of Education.
Under that test, speaking out on a matter of public concern may be grounds for dismissal if the speech would "destroy the relationship of loyalty and trust required of confidential employees," the article stated.
Such a test led the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals last year to uphold the firing of a school superintendent in Salado, Texas.
The safest course is to work behind the scenes, the men wrote, by "turning to groups with a tradition of of active involvement in school board elections.
"You could lobby these groups to hold forums or outline for them areas of questioning you believe are important to the district and likely to smoke out candidates' views," Szeptycki and Dodge wrote.
Two riskier courses of action include speaking to reporters or writing a letter to the editor opposing certain candidates or recruiting opposition to actively oppose fundamentalists, especially those posing as mainstream candidates, the two wrote.
by CNB