Public Schools: Pleasantville's Unpleasantness

ENTERING

PLEASANTVILLE, IA.

HOME OF 1,023 FRIENDLY PEOPLE

AND FEW KNUCKLEHEADS

The highway sign's last line is no longer a gag in Pleasantville, a farm center near Des Moines, where friendly people now call one another Communists or John Birchers, 19 of the town's 34 teachers have quit, and replacements cannot be found to teach 700 children.

Among the key opponents in this town-splitting controversy are School Superintendent Fred C. Nus and Housewife Elberta Gilderbloom, a former teacher whom Nus once turned down for a job. Mrs. Gilderbloom ran for the school board, won, and last fall helped elect two ultraconservative members, including one who says he sympathizes with the John Birch Society. The three dominate the five-member board, and Nus says Mrs. Gilderbloom told him: "If I can't work under you, then you won't work under me."

Moving in on Nus's responsibilities, Mrs. Gilderbloom and her supporters voted to toss out a faculty-designed change in the grading system, and began meddling in classrooms. One teacher was told to stop class discussion of Communism; another was reprimanded for mentioning menstruation in a mixed physiology class. Some students, says one history teacher, began taking a blindly ultrarightist line in class—calling federal aid to education "Communistic," for example, and criticizing President Johnson for being friendly with Auto Unionist Walter Reuther. At the same time, Pleasantville was well supplied with right-wing literature, much of it distributed by a cafe owner who asserts that "Communism is infiltrating our schools through the National Education Association."

Last December, Superintendent Nus was forced to resign, as of the end of the school year, and most of the departing teachers are quitting out of sympathy for him. The N.E.A.-affiliated Iowa State Education Association has urged all teachers to refuse jobs in

Pleasantville. The Iowa house of representatives has voted unanimously to investigate. Many townspeople now ruefully admit that they were "asleep at the last election."

Whatever the outcome, not all Pleasantville teachers agree that quitting is the best way to handle "unbearable working conditions." Says History Teacher Hazel M. Flora: "If the Birch Society is here, then the place for me is right here in school—teaching American history to my students."