Midlands school board to ban fantasy book series over complaint initially dismissed
The Lexington-Richland 5 school board voted Monday night to overturn a district review committee’s decision on retaining a fantasy book, instead deciding to remove it and all other books in its series.
The school board voted after hearing an appeal of a review committee’s decision to keep “A Court of Mist and Fury,” a young adult novel by Sarah J. Maas. The resolution as voted on would also ban four other books in the fantasy series that includes the challenged book. The series is called “A Court of Thorns and Roses” after its first book.
The vote came after a committee of teachers, parents and librarians last month voted 8-1 to keep the book in school libraries after a parental challenge.
District library supervisor Carol Lunsford said the committee read the whole 640-page book in order to evaluate it in its entirety, “without extracting passages out of context.” They found “A Court of Mist and Fury” to fit within district guidelines as a recommended book for young adult readers, with themes of “good versus evil, strong female leads and fantasy fiction,” she said.
While it does contain sexually explicit scenes, those “scenes are not dominant” in the book, Lunsford said. She noted the same book is available in libraries in Richland 1, Lexington 1, Charleston and Greenville schools.
But district resident Karena Phelps, who made the complaint, contended the sexual material in the book was strong enough to warrant exclusion from school libraries. She read into the record a lengthy sex scene between two characters she said happens early in the novel.
“It’s peppered with titillating scenes,” Phelps said, noting that 27 school districts removed the book last school year. “A Court of Mist and Fury” one of the most challenged books in the country, according to the American Library Association.
Earlier this year, the neighboring Lexington 2 school district also removed the sequel “A Court of Silver Flames” from its school libraries, along with 16 others.
The board voted 5-2 to pull the books, with Elizabeth Barnhardt, Rebecca Blackburn Hines, Matt Hogan, Catherine Huddle and Kevin Scully voting in favor. Mike Satterfield and Kimberly Snipes voted against.
Scully earlier proposed that the school board drop any reference to the other books in the series, which had not been challenged or reviewed under the district’s policy, and keep “A Court of Mist and Fury” for students 18 and up.
“I was 18 for most of my senior year of high school,” Scully said, or old enough to sign up for military service and operate a motor vehicle, he said.
He worried the school library was the only place some students would have access to reading material at all, and while district policy allows parents to set limits on what materials students can access from the library, “if you do that for everyone, it’s against parental choice.”
Scully’s proposal was rejected 4-2, with only Scully and Snipes voting in support. Satterfield abstained.
Hines, the school board chair, said asking parents to police school libraries for material they don’t want their children to read puts too much of the responsibility on the parent. ”How are you going to opt out of books that you don’t know exist?” she said.
“I realize kids have a cellphone and they can obtain really obscene information from their Chromebook, from TV, from the news, from the bookstore... but those are not public schools,” Hines said. She was one of several board members who also tried to read the book.
“It’s an intense book,” she said. “An emotionally sensitive 17- or 18-year-old shouldn’t read it without somebody to talk to about what’s said in it.”
Huddle said she tried to read the book and “I couldn’t get past Chapter 2,” she said. But she did read an interview with Maas where the author said the book should be categorized as “new adult” — for readers between 18 and 25 — rather than the “young adult” category aimed at teenagers.
Two speakers during the public comment period of Monday’s school board meeting supported removing “A Court of Mist and Fury,” including Lisa Kejr, CEO of the anti-human trafficking organization Lighthouse for Life. Kejr fears that exposure to sexual material can leave children desensitized to sex and more vulnerable to exploitation, and that such material even “fuels the demand for sex trafficking.”
But others were more reluctant to overrule the committee that had previously made a decision about the book. Snipes called the effort to remove the entire series a “knee-jerk reaction,” adding that the decision will encourage more challenges to the school system’s books.
“We’re getting ready to open up the floodgates, and we’re going to have to decide where do we draw the line,” Snipes said.
Satterfield said that as a former principal, he had often had to put his personal feelings aside to deal with competing claims from parents and staff.
“As offended as y’all are, there are folks who are just as offended by talk of sorcery or things that are against their religion, and they’re just as passionate about those things,” he said. “We put the policy in place for this committee, and they came up with a decision... if the committee comes to a decision, why are we not following the policy? That’s not a good message to them.”
Barnhardt, on the other hand, supported removing the entire series from library shelves. “Taxpayers’ money should not go to support it,” Barnhardt said. “Ms. Phelps represents many, many mothers and people with any kind of common sense.”
At the time the complaint was made, Lexington-Richland 5 only had three copies of the book, and the district ordered six more copies for members of the committee to review.
Superintendent Akil Ross told board members he was unsure how to proceed with a directive to remove the entire series, including four books that have not been challenged in the school district or reviewed by committee as district policy calls for.
“To consider titles that have not come through the process, I don’t know how to move it,” Ross said.
But in the end, the school board voted to take all of Maas’s books out of the classroom.
.jpg)