The hunt is on for a sporting-interest magazine that officials of the Paris-Union (Ill.) School District 95 consider appropriate for the collection of the Mayo Middle School library. The search was triggered by the board’s February 7 support of Principal Melanie Ogle for pulling Guns and Ammo from media-center shelves.
“We’ve cancelled our subscription,” School Superintendent Mike Watts told American Libraries, noting that the action “fostered a request for another magazine that would represent those interests.” The alternate title that teacher Spencer Jobst proposed, the youth-oriented gun-safety magazine Insight, was also deemed “not the most appropriate for our curriculum,” Watts said.
Ogle, who told the February 2 Chicago-area Daily Southtown she’d allow her hunting-aficionado son to read Guns and Ammo, ordered the magazine removed after a teacher objected to its inclusion on library shelves. “I wasn’t prepared to say that these were magazines we needed to have in our school library, given today’s climate,” she explained at a late-January board meeting.
Posted February 14, 2000.