The mother of a Great Falls (Mont.) High School student has announced plans to appeal a materials-review committee’s decision to retain Ken Follett’s thriller The Hammer of Eden. Debbie Scherrer challenged the book after finding “many detailed sexual scenes and profanities throughout” the copy her son brought home from the school library, she told the school board November 14.
Great Falls High School principal Steve Henneberg wrote Scherrer that access to a work that “offends or bores a person needs to be preserved for all of us.” Scherrer told NBC-TV’s KTGF affiliate November 15 that she agrees, “for adults,” adding that 13- and 14-year-olds “are still kids, not young adults.”
The news outlet reported a day earlier that Scherrer asked the school board to extend its ban on student use of “vulgar, offensive, lewd, or indecent speech” to library materials. Superintendent Brian Dunn promised to compare student-behavior and selection policies, cautioning, “There may be a difference between what a person has a right to read privately and what he has a right to say out loud and impose on somebody else.”
Posted November 20, 2000.