FRIGHTS FALL OUT OF FAVOR.

Byline: Erik Nelson Staff Writer

More and more schools across the region are scrapping traditional Halloween costume parades and other festivities to head off religious objections and keep violent imagery to a minimum.

It is a shift that fans of the holiday find, well, horrifying.

Some school administrators say they're canceling Halloween parties in favor of more time in the classroom. But they concede they're also worried about the political correctness of a pagan holiday at schools, especially as campuses become more ethnically and culturally diverse.

From Glendale to Sunland and beyond, schools are either discarding such holiday events altogether or holding them after school and during weekends.

In many schools, the word ``fall'' or ``harvest'' is substituting for ``Halloween'' in a celebration that has many of the trappings of the traditional holiday. Pumpkins, cornstalks, costumes and, of course, candy abound at these gatherings, but there's nothing ghastly or frightening about them.

``For my own kids, (Halloween) should be something happy, cheerful and nonoffensive to everybody,'' said Julie Webb, chairwoman of the Fall Festival at Apperson Street School in Sunland. ``I don't feel my child's role model should be Freddy Krueger.''

Instead of the murderous villain of the ``Nightmare on Elm Street'' movies, Webb will outfit her second-grader as a ladybug. Kim Winckler, an administrative assistant at the school, has sent home costuming guidelines in hopes that other parents will follow her example.

``No evil tendencies, no ghoulish themes; nothing like that,'' Winckler explained. ``Many years ago, they called it a Halloween parade, but we got away from the Halloween theme. It just upset too many parents.''

Around the San Fernando Valley and surrounding communities, teachers, parents and administrators are treading carefully when it comes to the holiday that was once the Celtic new year and later became All Hallow's Eve, a night to honor Christian martyrs.

``Some of the elementary schools feel that (a school Halloween party) is a safe vehicle for them to celebrate it, rather than go out in the neighborhood and ask for candy,'' said Naomi Suenaka, director of instructional support services in the Los Angeles Unified School District's Local District C in the Southwest Valley.

In the East Valley, Local District B Superintendent Judy Burton said she has seen the holiday fading for nearly a decade, ever since she was an inner-city principal and heard parents who were Jehovah's Witnesses complain about the holiday.

``They were concerned that those children would feel left out and that the school was conducting an activity in which all students couldn't participate,'' Burton said.

``There's also the issue of the use of instructional time for a parade that mainly is just fun,'' Burton said, remembering when she was principal of Hart Street School in Canoga Park. ``Even then, people were talking about having a regular instructional day and keeping the Halloween activity at the end of the day.''

In some schools, ``they're reading books about Halloween instead of using the typical costumes and party,'' Burton said.

Even other holidays have been affected, she said.

``You still see Valentine's Day art and certainly winter holiday art, but certainly much less than in the past,'' Burton said. Nowadays, children are more likely to be learning to cut and paste pumpkin or heart images on a computer, picking up skills appropriate to their grade-level curriculum.

That's especially true at Carpenter Avenue School in Studio City, where children measure and weigh pumpkins as a math exercise and kindergartners plant pumpkin seeds to observe the stages of plant growth, said Assistant Principal Heidi Brahms.

``It's a way to use days the kids celebrate and bring instructional activities to the room,'' Brahms said. In addition to measuring pumpkins for math, older children can write holiday-oriented essays for English and ``contextually engaging children with the seasons, with holidays, with events, is social studies also.''

Halloween festivals have always been held on the weekends at R.D. White Elementary School in Glendale, said Principal Jan Homan. The school holds an annual carnival on a Saturday when students can show off their costumes.

Teachers like the Saturday festival so they can save classroom time for learning, not playing. Holding a parade or party during the day can take away from learning.

``For some children, this is very distracting,'' Homan said. ``It's very hard to settle back into the business of the day.''

Horace Mann Elementary School in Glendale is catching on to this notion this year. It scrapped the annual Halloween parade and rescheduled it for after school because educators need the classroom time, said Principal Lynda Christian.

The time-crunch to squeeze in the statewide academic standards have compelled Horace Mann students to skip class-time parties, such as birthday and holiday festivals.

``They need every instructional minute,'' Christian said. ``We have stopped having any fluff.''

Instead, teachers use themes such as fall and pumpkins in classroom lessons on poetry and writing, Christian said.

But not everyone thinks that Halloween needs to be ``contextually engaging,'' rather than scary or just plain fun.

The idea of banning Halloween at Colfax Avenue School in Valley Village ``would be a travesty,'' said Richard Gasparian of Sherman Oaks, whose third-grade daughter, Glenna, will be dressing up as Pippi Longstocking this year.

``It's a wonderful holiday for the kids to just play pretend. I don't personally see anything wrong with being the Grim Reaper. Kids know it's pretend, and I don't think there's any danger in it,'' said Gasparian, a timing director for animated television programs.

Some schools try to reach a compromise on all fronts, as did Darby Avenue School in Northridge this year.

Although the school hadn't received any complaints about its Halloween celebrations in past years, ``we have a very caring community, and we thought it was something that could be an issue,'' said Principal Noney O'Banion.

So on Tuesday the school will have its Harvest Festival, but it will include a haunted house with steaming dry ice ``to make it spooky and scary,'' as well as volunteers from California State University, Northridge, who will to read harvest-themed books to the costumed children.

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Photo:

Dressed as Snow White, Miku Tokunaga, 6, right, joins costumed classmates in a hoop-toss at R.D. White Elementary's Halloween festival, traditionally held on a Saturday.

Joe Binoya/Staff Photographer