A parent filed a complaint about a library book at a Midlands school. Here’s what happened

School library books have become a new front in the country’s all-encompassing culture war, and South Carolina is no exception to that.

Recently the presence of certain library books in schools have drawn controversy at Lexington-Richland 5 after parents and the S.C. Superintendent of Education took issue with “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe, and “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George Johnson. The books are coming of age stories about queer characters and contain sexually explicit material.

Lexington-Richland 5 has two copies of “All Boys Aren’t Blue” in Irmo High School’s library, but has never had copies of “Gender Queer: A Memoir” in district libraries, the district said in an email.

Following intervention from S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster, Fort Mill School District removed “Gender Queer” from its high school libraries.

After the Fort Mill controversy, many school districts throughout the state revamped their processes for officially challenging books in school libraries.

Earlier this year, the S.C. Department of Education published a model policy for school districts to adopt for handling requests to remove a particular library book, department spokesman Ryan Brown said.

That model policy calls for those who want a book to be removed to fill out a “Reconsideration of Library/Media Center Materials Form” and submit it to the district. The form asks if the person lives in the district, whether students are required to read the material, the portion of the material that’s being questioned, which age group (if any) would be appropriate to read the material, and more.

The policy calls for the district superintendent to create at least one committee that includes school officials and a parent separate from the one who filed the complaint, according to the model policy. The model policy calls for an appeals process, but leaves those specifics to an individual school board.

Since the S.C. Department of Education published the new, proposed guidance in January, many districts have changed their policies to line up with the department’s recommendations, Brown said.

But many complaints about books are made informally on social media or during public comment at school board meetings, The State found. The State filed Freedom of Information Act requests to all public school districts in Lexington, Richland and Kershaw counties to find out which books were being challenged.

As of early February, when the requests were filed, only one school district received a formal challenge to a library book.

The challenge, detailed below, is an example of how school districts respond to formal complaints about library books and how rulings are issued.

The challenge

Kershaw County schools received one challenge for a book housed at Doby’s Mill Elementary School, according to documents obtained under the state Freedom of Information Act. The book was a series of poems called Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice by Mahogany Browne, Elizabeth Acevedo and Olivia Gatwood.

The book is described on a publisher’s site as “A collection of poems to inspire kids to stay woke and become a new generation of activists.”

The parent who challenged the book took issue with the book’s pro social-justice themes, saying the book encourages children to “talk back” to parents, that “a child may think they are bad because of their skin color,” or that a child may “consider burning something down.”

Particular scenes the complaint noted were: a section where the book says while people of color often worry about discrimination, white people don’t necessarily experience that; a scene where a police officer gives a disapproving look at a group of Black people, the presence of Black Lives Matter signs and scenes where characters have their fists in the air in protest, according to documents.

The parent called for the book to be removed no matter the age of the student reading it.

While some parent groups have sought to remove certain books from schools, the parent who called for this book’s removal claimed to represent a group seeking to remove books, according to the documents.

After convening two separate committees consisting of parents, principals, media specialists and other district employees, the committees read the book and decided to keep it in the library, documents show. The decision was also informed by a letter from the S.C. Association of School Librarians, but the letter was not included in the document release.

The committee issued a point-by-point rebuttal to the parent’s complaints about the book. For example, the committee said the book told kids to speak out about their feelings but to do so respectfully. The part of the book that deals with burning something down is explained by the committee as metaphorically burning down the “box” people are placed in when they are stereotyped, according to the documents. The picture in which a police officer is looking disapprovingly at Black people sitting at a bar was a reference to a famous, 1960s Civil Rights photo, according to the documents.

“There is nothing harmful to children in this book. If anything, it brings about conversations of different viewpoints,” Doby’s Mill Elementary Principal Alana Powers wrote in a Sept. 7 committee report. The book is available in the school library, but will not be mandated into curricula, Powers said.

The review process, from when the parent first discussed the book with the principal to the second committee’s ruling, was about one month, documents show.

Roughly two weeks after that, the parent asked the school board to reconsider removing the book during the school board’s Oct. 5 meeting. During the school board’s Feb. 1, 2022, meeting, the board voted 5-3 to uphold the committee’s decision to keep the book in the library, Kershaw County Schools spokeswoman Mary Anne Byrd said in an email.

This story was originally published March 16, 2022 at 2:57 PM.