Meet the Parent

Heidi Harper cusses only at school board meetings.

Harper is the designated cusser for Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools, better known as ClassKC — better known as the Blue Valley School District's book-challenging parent activists.

Harper says she doesn't normally have a trash mouth. But it's her official duty to attend school board meetings and read excerpts from books on Blue Valley's required reading list for communication arts classes. She finds objectionable passages and recites them with inflection, with the zeal of someone who was an actor in high school.

In March, when the Kansas Board of Education was debating changes that would require parents to sign permission slips before their children could take human sexuality classes, Harper went to the meeting in Topeka. But she wasn't there to talk about sex ed. She was there to talk about necrophilia and bestiality.

"As a parent of three teens and an educator myself, I'm perplexed at how excerpts of men fucking cows or calves or boys sucking on big fat donkey cocks is beneficial to the healthy maturation of children," Harper told the board in an episode the Pitch recapped on March 23 (KC Strip, "Warning: Adult Content!"). "Are educators truly honest about the harms of interspecies sex or sex with dead corpses?"

Reading fuck-filled passages has become a common tactic for ClassKC. If it's good enough for the kids to read, they argue, then it's good enough for school administrators to hear.

When Harper finished, board chairman Steve Abrams thanked her.

Abrams had already taken a jab at the Blue Valley School District in a November 2005 Wichita Eagle op-ed piece. "Superintendents and local school boards in some districts continue to promulgate pornography as 'literature,' even though many parents have petitioned the local boards to remove the porn," Abrams wrote.

ClassKC was started in 2004 by Janet Harmon, a Blue Valley mom. Five early members collected 500 signatures demanding that the district remove 14 books from its required reading list. The Blue Valley Board of Education ignored the petition, but ClassKC has clashed with students, parents, teachers, board members, the ACLU and the NAACP over novels in the schools' curriculum ever since.

After hearing from angry parents at the February and March board meetings, state education commissioner Bob Corkins called on Blue Valley officials to justify the books' educational value at the state board's April meeting. After hearing from Blue Valley administrators, the state board took no action — but Blue Valley reps hadn't made much progress winning over the board's conservatives. The Kansas City Star reported that Connie Morris (a state school board member who represents the 5th District, essentially the western half of Kansas) feared that books containing suicide or rape might influence students.

"A bad tree can't bear good fruit," Morris said at the meeting.

Now parents in other school districts are borrowing ClassKC's tactics. Nine books survived challenges at Township High School District 214 in Arlington Heights, Illinois, The Chicago Tribune reported in May. Board member Leslie Pinney challenged the books, citing ClassKC's Web site — which extensively chronicles profanity, sexual content and violence in reading-list titles — as a resource for her research.

Still, ClassKC's future is in flux. Five books survived challenges this school year — Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima, Pat Conroy's The Lords of Discipline, Robert McCammon's Boy's Life, and Toni Morrison's Beloved and Song of Solomon.

"We've made some progress as far as talking to parents and making parents more aware," Harper says. "And the unfortunate thing is, I don't know how much progress we've made with the district."

After two years of book battles, the women of ClassKC say they haven't been taken seriously. They're treated as "merely moms," Harper says, and the media downplay their expertise and ignore their credentials. Three of the five moms have degrees in education, Harper says, and four have master's degrees.

"I think when women at some times speak, it just doesn't carry as much clout," Harper tells the Pitch.

So now ClassKC has a man. Two years ago, the group recruited Gregg Motley to be their spokesman, and he's becoming a more active mouthpiece.

If the litmus test for obscenity is knowing it when you see it, Motley has seen it all.

Motley, a short, stocky man who looks like a drill sergeant, can't be dismissed as just another overprotective parent.

Two years ago, Motley, now 49, quit a 24-year career as a banker to run the Kansas City office of the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families (a role he relinquished in April to return to banking). The National Coalition's Web site says the group wants "all people to live under the Lordship of Christ." It lists four goals: "Educate the Christian community on sexual ethics, according to a biblical worldview, encourage and challenge Christians to live sexually pure lives, engage Christians in public policy relative to sexual ethics and embrace those harmed by pornography and help restore them to sexual wholeness."