County health teachers say a rumor that they are giving students condoms and using bananas to demonstrate how to use them was an unfair shot at them the day of the primary election.
For the record, said Westminster East Middle School health teacher Diana Steppling, they do neither.
But school board candidate Laura E. Albers said the reports of the rumor are being distorted to affect Tuesday's election.
"That has never come out of my mouth," Ms. Albers said, although she said she learned after the Sept. 13 primary that one of her poll workers had spread the rumor about condoms. "The person who made this remark was asked no longer to work [on the campaign].
"This whole thing is getting blown into a big giant thing to derail my campaign," she said.
The banana comment was made at the Mount Airy Elementary School polling place, said school board member Ann M. Ballard. She said she heard it there and tried to correct the poll worker.
Ms. Albers denied that any of her workers was at Francis Scott Key High School, where health teacher Gloria Kniss said she heard a similar comment on primary day.
Ms. Kniss, a health teacher at Westminster West Middle School, said she was at Key to vote when a poll worker told her that health teachers were giving away condoms. He didn't say anything about bananas, she said, and he didn't know she was a health teacher.
She said the poll worker was handing out Ms. Albers' literature.
But Ms. Albers said she had no one scheduled to work at that polling place on primary day, and that if anyone did make such a comment, perhaps it was someone working against her, rather than for her.
"I just don't believe they made that remark," Ms. Albers said, then noted that the source was a health teacher. "The whole thing is coming from the health teachers."
Ms. Albers, running for her first public office, has been a parent activist who has condemned schools as delving too deeply into values that should be left to the family. She has criticized some aspects of the health and guidance programs, saying they use psychological practices and assume families are dysfunctional. She is among four candidates seeking two seats on the board.
Ms. Ballard identified the poll worker she spoke with at Mount Airy, but attempts by The Sun to reach him were unsuccessful, and Ms. Albers declined to confirm the worker's identity.
"I'm not going to discuss who the campaign worker is," she said.
The candidate's version of what happened at the Mount Airy polling place differed from Ms. Ballard's, but Ms. Albers acknowledged that she was not there.
Ms. Ballard said she overheard the worker telling voters that county health teachers were giving condoms to students and demonstrating how to use them on bananas.
She said she approached the poll worker and told him that what he had said wasn't true. She said he became rude and accused her of not being a Christian. Ms. Ballard said she is a Christian.
She said she told the man she would look into the matter and send him a letter.
"He said, 'Don't send me a letter,' " Ms. Ballard said.
She said that the next day she asked school officials to investigate whether teachers had done what the man alleged. They investigated, she said, and reported that no such incidents had occurred.
Ms. Albers said her campaign worker was responding to others at the polls who were characterizing her as being against all sex education.
"My poll worker responded with misinformation," Ms. Albers said. She said she has apologized twice, at a public debate at Carrolltowne Elementary School, when Ms. Steppling raised the
issue, and to Sykesville Middle School Principal Donald Pyles the day after it happened.
Mr. Pyles said he called Ms. Albers that day because he had heard of the incident. He said she apologized for the poll worker and knew the statement not to be true.
Ms. Steppling said Ms. Albers has not apologized to the health teachers, nor taken a strong enough stand against the inaccurate remark.
Ms. Steppling said that, because the two incidents occurred on different ends of the county, she doesn't believe the remark in Mount Airy was isolated.
"If Mrs. Albers says she's not responsible for this, I can accept that," Ms. Steppling said. "But then I have to wonder, who's running her campaign?"