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Wisconsin School Restricts What My Mother Doesn’t Know

The School District of Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, voted April 30 to limit middle-school-library access to Sonya Sones’s What My Mother Doesn’t Know to 7th- and 8th-graders. Before the vote, 6th-graders could read the novel if permitted by the school library media specialist, Spring Hill Middle School librarian Miranda Ladwig said in the May 3 Baraboo News Republic.

The action was taken after Sherry Volkey, the mother of an 11-year-old student, appealed a reconsideration committee decision declining her request to remove the book entirely from the school media center as well as the school’s accelerated reading program. Characterizing as “soft porn” the book of poems describing the coming-of-age experiences of a fictional 14-year-old girl, Volkey told the school board, “I was deeply appalled when she brought this book to my attention and read to me a poem in here about getting undressed and taking your bare chest and sticking it up against a winter window.”

Ladwig told board members that the reconsideration committee had concluded Sones’s book “was relevant to middle school lives, that girls have thoughts and feelings that they don’t necessarily always feel that it’s okay to share.” Board member and police officer Jesse Weaver agreed, asserting that if such a book answers a question “that Mom and Dad aren’t available for, it’s 100% worth it.”

Posted May 4, 2007.

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