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Banned Books Go Back to School in MarylandThe superintendent of the Carroll County (Md.) Public Schools reinstated to high-school library shelves in mid-January two young-adult novels that he had banned several months earlier. Charles I. Ecker announced January 10 that Carolyn Mackler’s The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things would be returned to high school libraries districtwide, although not to middle-school collections. The following day, he reinstated Dan Elish’s Born Too Short: The Confessions of an Eighth Grade Basket Case. Additionally, Ecker ordered the retention on the shelves of high- and middle-school libraries of Terry Trueman’s Inside Out, which was challenged during the 2004–2005 academic year.Ecker’s initial decisions regarding the Mackler and Elish novels had overridden the recommendations of materials review committees to keep the titles. He had objected to the authors’ use of profanity and sexual imagery—a stance that David Rocah, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, characterized in a December 8 letter to Ecker as “removing books from the school libraries because they deal frankly and honestly with problems that teens face, because they deal with controversial subjects, or because they contain some profanity,” Rocah stated, alluding to body-image issues explored by Mackler and Elish and the theme of schizophrenia in Inside Out. “We do not and could not assert that schools must purchase these books for their libraries. But we believe that the law is clear that they cannot be purged from such libraries for constitutionally suspect reasons.” “I think students have a right to have materials and I feel sometimes that middle school students are getting into things that adults don’t realize,” Bonnie Kreamer, librarian at CCPS’s Winters Mill High School, said in the January 12 Baltimore Sun in reaction to the reinstatements. “We kind of accomplished what we wanted,” WMHS junior Crystal Gardner told the Sun December 11, referring to her pro-Mackler petition drive, which gathered almost 350 signatures but hadn’t reached Ecker’s desk by the time he approved the reshelving. However, the superintendent declined to restore three other books that Rocah had inquired about in his letter. Leaving Disneyland by Alexander Parsons, The Beet Fields: Memories of a Sixteenth Summer by Gary Paulsen, and Whistle Me Home by Barbara Wersba will remain barred from the CCPS library shelves, Ecker said, explaining that he would not revisit decisions made before he became superintendent in mid-2002. Posted January 13, 2006. |
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