Linda Nall, who revealed herself as the complainant in a September 25 letter to the Brazosport Facts newspaper wrote that she had objected August 29 to a novel that “had the F-word 13 times in the first chapter.” At the September 19 meeting, parent Monte Hurley voiced a separate objection to depictions of sex acts and profanity in Zero to Sixty, which his 12-year-old had borrowed. “I understand that my children hear this stuff in the public, and they’ll hear it in school, I’m sure, but I don’t want my tax dollars to teach it to my children,” Hurley said in the September 21 Facts.
Buckner told American Libraries that district officials decided to temporarily bar WBJH students from borrowing any books while a team of four district librarians reviewed all the fiction in the junior-high library collection. The process took three days, and “no other books were identified as inappropriate for the students served at the middle school,” she said. The checkout moratorium was lifted September 28, after the librarians created a restricted “young adult” section from which students can borrow only with written parental permission.
Asserting that “our district took a proactive stance with regards to our recent book challenges,” Buckner emphasized that, contrary to local media reports, “at no time were our libraries closed to students in this district.” Superintendent Carol Bertholf also sought to clear the air, writing parents September 29 that “human error” caused the challenged books to enter the collection and that books dealing with subjects “that some parents may consider ’sensitive’ topics such as death, suicide, physical or sexual abuse, and teenage dating relationships” have been moved to the restricted collection at WBJH as well as at two elementary schools where 6th-graders are among the media-center patrons.
The letter goes on to remind parents that some school-library books “may still contain words that are considered insensitive or profane, but the context of the book and the literary importance of the book is its true message.” Bertholf lists as examples Gone with the Wind and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Posted September 29, 2006.