DOUGLASS, Kan. — If they know anything, person after person here declares, they know this: God created them. Created all mankind. As for the talk about man evolving from tree-swinging apes? A hoax, they scoff--and a cruel one at that.

The biblical creation story is bedrock belief for many in this blue-collar prairie town.

Yet even as they call evolution a fraud, residents by and large say they do not object to their children studying it in school. Sure, there are caveats. Some think parents should be able to take their kids out of class when the subject comes up. Others insist evolution be labeled a tenuous theory. Still, they grudgingly acknowledge that their children should be exposed to it, if only because it's so widely accepted.

The complex views expressed and debated here reflect the confusion roiling communities across Kansas since the state Board of Education last month voted to delete evolution from the mandatory science curriculum.

Teachers in Kansas still are free to present evolution, the theory that all life on Earth shares a common ancestor nearly 4 billion years old. And no one is required to teach creation, the biblical view that God created all species over the course of six days.

But the board's decision is far-reaching nonetheless.

It's now up to Kansas' 304 school districts to decide whether to spend class time on a topic that's not required and will not be tested on statewide assessment exams.

Parents can try to influence the curriculum through their elected school boards. But often, as in Douglass, those parents are deeply conflicted--believing on the one hand that their children should hear about evolution but convinced on the other that it's blasphemous.

So in the end, both evolutionists and creationists agree, what Kansas kids learn about our origins will depend in large measure on their teachers--and, quite possibly, on their teachers' personal beliefs.

"They'll be able to teach what they want to teach," said Mary Douglass Brown, a Board of Education member.

Thus, in a Topeka middle school, science teacher Shannon Keller plans to delay teaching evolution to the end of the year, figuring he won't have time to get to it. If he does find a spare hour for evolution, he said, he'll tell his students that, in his opinion, "the odds are astronomical against it." And he'll "provide examples of complex organisms" that he believes could not possibly have evolved due to random genetic mutation.