Schools don’t always play well with others

Y ou don’t have to agree with Donna Orme to recognize her courage and tenacity.

Orme spent 15 months trying to get the Central Valley School District to remove Bernard Malamud’s novel “The Natural” from its high school curriculum. On Monday the CV school board turned her down, leaving her surprised and disappointed, and I can see why.

For the record, I’d have been concerned if the board had dumped “The Natural,” an acclaimed book by a celebrated author.

“For 3 1/2 decades, beginning with the publication in 1952 of his wonderful first novel, ‘The Natural,’ Malamud was one of our most admired writers of fiction,” writes Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley.

Admittedly, “The Natural” includes some sensitive passages — 88 of them by Orme’s count — and a lot of parents are likely to be squeamish about having their kids exposed to it in a classroom full of tee-heeing adolescents. But good literature often scrapes society’s grain, which is probably why top-quality writing shows up so often on challenged-book lists.

If it’s not sexuality in “The Natural,” it’s witchcraft in the Harry Potter books, or racist terms in “Tom Sawyer.” Or excessive violence. Or political propaganda on behalf of, say, environmentalism. Or religious advocacy — or religious disrespect.

As Ray Bradbury, author of “Fahrenheit 451,” said, “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” If schools heeded every protest, kids would have nothing left to study in their literature classes except ashes.

To Orme, however, “The Natural,” despite its literary quality, is pornographic. It is, in her view, one more component of a “toxic” learning environment, where couples make out in the halls, students wear provocative attire and teachers show R-rated movies. Orme already had concerns along those lines last year, then she found out what her 16-year-old daughter was reading in English class.

“So I pushed the book to the top to see where the moral values are in the district,” she said.

That was more than a year ago. On Monday, the episode reached the conclusion mentioned above: “The Natural” will remain on Central Valley’s approved reading list. End of story.

But what about the beginning of the story, when Orme first brought her concerns before CV officials?

School districts are imposing institutions, bureaucratic structures that can be daunting to the lonely parent with a grievance. They have an army of credentialed specialists toting binders full of regulations and research. They do not respond hospitably when someone questions their shelves full of answers. Moreover, elected school board members generally take their direction from district administrators rather than holding those administrators accountable to the expectations of the public that employs them.

“I was way out of my comfort zone,” says Orme, but she went to work anyway.

Nobody at CV bothered to tell her, until she was months into the process, that there were a specified form and a specified procedure she could use to formally launch her protest over “The Natural.” Instead, she was told what countless other parents have heard when approaching various school district officials — that no one else had complained.

“They have this divide and conquer attitude,” said Orme.

Even when she copied down the troublesome passages from Malamud’s novel and collected more than 60 supportive signatures on a petition, she was told that the petition was misleading — because of her use of ellipses to separate selected passages from the book — and therefore invalid.

When her issue was due for formal action by the school board, she had difficulties finding out when it would be on the agenda.

As a parent, a taxpayer and a patron of a public school district Orme deserved a more accommodating response — not the outcome she wanted, maybe, but at least a respectful willingness to get to the bottom of her concern.

In conjunction with Monday’s decision, CV officials have ordered that in the future parents will be told in advance what’s on the reading list so they can exercise options available to them. Had she wanted, Orme could have asked that her daughter be moved to another class that wasn’t reading “The Natural” or she could have had her daughter choose a different book from a list of alternatives. Not knowing what was on the list until it was too late, however, she never had the chance.

She goes away from this experience, a member of the public feeling mistreated by a public school system that preaches the merits of diversity. Judging by the energy and determination she demonstrated on behalf of her family and her ideals, you’d think they’d want to recruit her, not alienate her.