THE BELL CURVE

THERE'S NO USE LYING WHEN CHILDREN CAN SEE THROUGH TO THE TRUTH

I read with interest about the Costa Mesa police "bursting" into the Back
Bay High School classroom of teacher Marc Katz a couple of weeks ago in
pursuit of the war on drugs. As in most wars, civil rights go down the
tubes when the troops are ordered into action. So the question becomes
whether or not the suspension of those rights in this instance belonging to
a classroom full of kids warrants such police action.

There seems to be general agreement among school officials that it doesn't.
A highly debatable policy allows police random searches of public areas on
local school district campuses, but they are not to disrupt the learning
process, and classrooms are off limits. Lynne Bloomberg, Newport Mesa's
drug and safety coordinator, was quoted in the Pilot as saying: "It's not
supposed to happen. And it won't happen again." Good. It shouldn't. But
another aspect of this affair interested me even more than the police state
search. According to the Pilot, Katz said his principal, Carol Costaldo,
forbade him to discuss the incident afterward with his students. He
formally requested release from that order at the following school board
meeting, but it wasn't on the agenda, and the board still hasn't responded.
It's too late now for the Back Bay kids. Whatever damage the order caused
has already taken place there.

A classroom full of young people many of them in continuation school
because they have problems in adapting to the society in which they find
themselves were denied an immediate explanation of an action which probably
fed some of their worst fantasies, as well as those of fellow students to
whom they described the invasion of their classroom. This seems to me to be
grievously wrongheaded.

I called both Costaldo and Katz for clarification, but only Katz returned
my call. He said that first of all he wanted to make it clear that the
police hadn't "burst" into his classroom. They waited outside his window
while the school's security officer interrupted his class to announce that
the room had to be vacated for the police. When an angry Katz told the
security officer that such a class interruption was illegal and the
principal should be summoned, he was told she was in a meeting. So Katz
told his students to leave quietly and went in search of the principal. By
the time he returned with her, the unproductive search had been completed.

That's when Katz says Costaldo told him despite his fervent pleas that the
kids needed to be debriefed that he wasn't to "agitate" them by discussing
the police action. Back in the classroom, Katz first had to deal with a
student who was allergic to dogs and had a violent reaction when he picked
up his backpack that the dog had sniffed.

Then Katz told the kids to get out their books and read, but they were
welcome, if they chose, to listen to his end of a phone call he was about
to make to union headquarters to report what had just happened which, of
course, further angered the principal when she heard about it.

When I called Linda Mook, president of the Newport Mesa Federation of
Teachers, it was clear from her discomfort that a number of complex issues
were involved and she was trying to protect confidences while still being
open with me. But on the issue of whether or not the students were better
served by silence or an open discussion of what happened, she was quite clear.

"I firmly believe," she told me, "that this was a teachable moment when the
students returned to their classroom, and they should have had the
opportunity to learn a civics lesson. This was, after all, a social studies
class." So it seems to me the most important issue here is honesty. How can
we possibly expect our kids to be honest with us if we aren't honest with
them? Lying to them or withholding critical information, which adds up to
the same thing on the grounds that they aren't ready for the truth and can
be best served with lies or half truths is sophistry of a high order. And
no place does this occur more often or more gratuitously than in the way we
communicate with our young people in the areas of drugs and sex.

There are frequent reports about kids being routinely and consistently lied
to by adults about both. For example, the people who support teaching
abstinence only in sex education classes apparently see nothing wrong with
scaring teens into this behavior by lying to them that AIDS can be
contracted through tears, and that condoms are only 30% effective in
protecting against the disease.

When a moderate Republican introduced a bill this year in the state
Assembly to require that all information presented in sex education classes
be medically accurate, there was a storm of protest from religious
conservatives attacking Planned Parenthood and challenging who should
determine what is medically accurate.

Kids are also fed a lot of baloney about the nature and impact of various
types of drugs most of which they know is baloney. The lethal dangers of
AIDS and addictive drugs can be presented a lot more effectively with
honesty than with fright wigs or silence.

So can the reasons a squad of police officers and their dogs were allowed
into a working classroom to violate the privacy of a group of confused
young people.