The parents of a 4th-grader in Cedarville, Arkansas, filed a federal lawsuit July 3 challenging the city school board’s placement of the Harry Potter series on a restricted borrowing list, which requires students to present written permission from a parent to borrow one of the four J. K. Rowling titles. The plaintiffs are Billy Ray Counts and Mary Nell Counts, the parents of a Cedarville student; Billy Ray Counts served on the materials review committee that recommended to the board in May that the district maintain unfettered access to the books.
Also serving on the committee was Cedarville High School librarian Estella Roberts, who asserted to the July 1 Fort Smith Southwest Times Record that the board’s 3–2 vote in June to restrict the series violated the landmark 1982 Island Tree v. Pico decision, which forbade officials from removing school-library materials “simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books.” Roberts contended that board members “were upset because they didn’t have any say” in the committee findings.
“Heavy-handed bureaucrats on the Cedarville School Board are trying to use government as a tool for censorship and to impose their own peculiar religious views,” plaintiff attorney Brian Meadors said in the July 5 Times Record. The original complainant, Angie Haney, had objected to the Harry Potter series because it characterized authority as “stupid” and portrayed “good witches and good magic.”
Posted July 15, 2002.