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HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. — Trustees at Huntington Beach Union High School District are one step closer to formulating a written policy that would ban the showing of full-length R-rated movies and require parental permission for in-class clips.
Trustees voted 4-0 on Jan. 15 to approve the policy. It will have to return to the council for one more vote before it can be implemented.
The district visited the issue after Jan Kazor, the parent of a 15-year-old girl, complained to school officials last year because her daughter was shown the movies “Chicago” and “Little Miss Sunshine” in her choir class.
Kazor said she began contacting attorneys after she claimed administrators were not taking her complaints seriously. Neither were some of the attorneys, she said, adding that she contacted about 10 before the Pacific Justice Institute was retained.
Karen Milan, an attorney in the firm’s Southern California office, said Chelsea Kazor was forced to watch the movies without any advance warning for the parents. Her mother said several sexual encounters, partial nudity, profanity and scenes featuring alcohol in “Chicago” made the film inappropriate for school use. “Little Miss Sunshine,” she said, didn’t fare much better with more than 30 f-words, depictions of a police officer being bribed with pornography, and a grandfather’s use of heroin. The grandfather, a main character in the film, also badgers his teenage grandson to have more sex and teaches his 7-year-old granddaughter a striptease routine for a beauty pageant.
“We applaud this parent for her persistence on what should be a common-sense issue,” Milam said. “Local theaters routinely prohibit 15-year-olds from watching R-rated movies without parental consent, so why should public high schools act less responsibly than the motion picture industry? We urge parents to check their school districts’ film policies.”
In the event a district has no formal policy, or has one that is inadequate, PJI can provide model policies.
District administrators said the proposed written policy reflects what teachers have already been instructed to do and that discussions were already under way to finalize the policy in writing when the Kazor complaint was filed.
“A school’s obligation to act in loco parentis—on behalf of parents—is a solemn duty, not a license to subject students to profanity and sex via movies with zero educational value,” said Brad Dacus, president of PJI. “The garbage shown to these young people in class was a serious breach of parental trust.”
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