Texas Middle School
Removes Go Ask Alice
The Aledo, Texas, school board voted June 14 to remove Go Ask Alice from the middle school library, and to require parental consent for students to borrow it from the high school library.
Following a parent’s complaint about the 1970s-era diary of a teen-age girl’s destructive experience with drugs and sex, the middle school’s screening committee decided to limit the book to students whose parents had given them permission to read it. The parent, dissatisfied with the decision, then went to the school board. Board President Steve Reid, who told the June 15 Fort Worth Star-Telegram that he had not read the book and has no intentions of doing so, said it should also be removed from the high school library.
Aledo Middle School Principal Bob Harmon told the Freedom Forum’s Web site that Go Ask Alice “was one of our most popular books.” Noting that the process leading up to the school board’s vote had been long and tedious, Harmon said, “Censoring books is a really difficult issue.”
Posted June 28, 1999.
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