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Miami School Board Blocks Reconsideration End RunThe board of the Miami-Dade County Public Schools voted 6–3 April 18 not to interfere with the system’s established materials-reconsideration process in the review of A Visit to Cuba, which has been challenged by a Cuban expatriate. The issue was raised by board member Frank Bolaños, who advocated the book’s immediate removal—bypassing the work begun a day earlier by a 17-member review committee and any subsequent appeals—because, he contended, “It is full of biases, prejudices, distortions, and stereotypes.” He decried as lies a passage in the children’s book by Alta Schreier that says, “The people of Cuba eat, work, and study like you.”Attorneys advised board members that circumventing the district’s established review policies would make MDCPS vulnerable to a lawsuit. “I am not willing to spend a quarter-million dollars that should be spent in the classroom to litigate an issue that is well established in the law of this country,” reacted board member Evelyn Greer. As more than a dozen people outside the meeting protested the book’s presence in media-center collections, the board heard testimony on both sides of the issue. “Freedom of speech is not freedom to lie,” asserted Sergio Rioseco, who recounted his upbringing in Cuba. “I am terrified of the suggestion of banning it from our schools to appease a segment of the community to which I happen to belong,” countered media specialist Omar Rodriguez-Hazan, adding, “I fear we may become what we protest against—a totalitarian government.” After the vote, Bolaños told the NBC-TV Miami affiliate WTVJ that hearing from both sides “is the beauty of the democratic society that we live in.” He added that the board is striving “to be very sensitive, to protect all civil liberties—the civil liberty to tell what is going on in Cuba, and also the civil liberty that the publisher has the right to publish the book.” Posted April 21, 2006. |
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