Posted June 24, 2005.

Arkansas Parent Demands Removal of 70 Titles

The parent of a middle-schooler in the Fayetteville (Ark.) Public Schools has threatened to file requests for reconsideration of 70 books in the system’s school-library collections unless the titles are removed and a parent board is established to oversee materials selection. Characterizing all 70 titles as sexually explicit, Laurie Taylor said in a June 22 e-mail to members of the school board and the district superintendent that her recent examination of the FPS library holdings unearthed books with passages about “threesomes, teenage sexual foreplay, detailed sexual escapades, explicit homosexual affairs, despicable language, dangerous instruction, and promotion of sexual behavior.”

Taylor has identified seven of the 70 books as: Forever by Judy Blume, Doing It by Melvin Burgess, The Homo Handbook: Getting in Touch with Your Inner Homo by Judy Carter, The Other Woman by Eric J. Dickey, GLBTQ: The Survival Guide for Queer and Questioning Teens by Kelly Huegel, Choke by Chuck Palahniuk, and Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez.

“The magnitude of the request is overwhelming,” Fayetteville school Superintendent Bob New said in the June 23 Northwest Arkansas Times, noting that the review policy “might have to be amended” if Taylor follows through.

The e-mail came almost a month after the Fayetteville school board voted 4–3 to move three sex-education books to the parent section of the system’s middle- and high-school libraries in response to three other requests for reconsideration Taylor made earlier this year. The relocation of Robie Harris’s often-challenged It’s Perfectly Normal and It’s So Amazing and Jeremy Daldry’s The Teenage Guy’s Survival Guide places them out of reach of Fayetteville students in most cases.

Posted June 24, 2005.