Graphic novel on drug addiction survives SC school district challenge
A graphic novel that centers on a family’s struggle with substance abuse will remain in a Midlands elementary school after the school board rejected a parent’s request to restrict access to the book.
The Lexington-Richland 5 school board voted narrowly Monday night to keep “Sunny Side Up” on library shelves in the district after a mother asked that the book be restricted by grade level and require a parent or guardian’s permission before it could be checked out.
Board members Scott Herring, Mike Satterfield, Kevin Scully and Kimberly Snipes voted to keep the middle-grade fiction book unrestricted, while Elizabeth Barnhardt, Jason Baynham and Catherine Huddle voted against the motion. That vote followed the 4-3 failure of a different measure that would have restricted student access to “Sunny Side Up,” with the same breakdown in board members’ votes.
A parent in the Chapin-Irmo area school district filed a formal challenge against “Sunny Side Up” after her third-grade daughter checked it out from the library at Piney Woods Elementary School. She objected to talk of substance abuse and depictions of characters drinking and smoking, as well as a scene where one character hits another.
The book — written by Jennifer Holm, with illustrations by Matthew Holm — is about a girl named Sunny sent to live with her grandfather in Florida over the summer, while her family back home deals with her brother’s substance abuse issues.
Board member Scully said he read the book before Monday’s hearing and found the book relatable to his own childhood experiences.
“I saw a lot of myself in that story and my experience as a child, with having family members impacted by substance abuse and regular life things that happen in all of our families,” Scully said. “For children like me, who were exposed to it very early, this type of book shows you that you’re not alone, you’re not experiencing something nobody else has gone through, and it’s a source of comfort and inclusion, and it’s a normal part of growing up.”
Scully worried that restricting access to the book, which would have required it to be taken off of library shelves and only be available on request, would have the effect of keeping it away from students who would benefit from reading it.
But Huddle said the board’s vote wouldn’t remove “Sunny Side Up” from district schools completely, and the book would still be available to students who could relate it to their own life circumstances.
“I would hope a parent would know and could ask for it, or a guidance counselor could ask for it,” Huddle said, but the state guidelines require a book to be “age and developmentally appropriate.”
“We have guidance for movies, and the rule for Motion Picture Association is that drug use is restricted to PG-13 and above,” she said.
District policy allows any parent to challenge the material available to students in school, and then the school board will hear the challenge during a public session to determine if the offending material should be removed or restricted. Under state law, a parent can also appeal a decision up to the state board of education, which can potentially remove a book from school library shelves statewide.
The parent who filed the complaint did not attend Monday’s board meeting.
Book bans in public schools have become a lightning rod in recent years. The same school district previously removed the fantasy series “A Court of Thorns and Roses” after a parent challenged sexual content in one book in the series, “A Court of Mist and Fury.”
Last year, the Chapin-Irmo area district removed and then returned a picture book biography of tennis great Billie Jean King in which King mentions being married to another woman. A neighboring district in Lexington 1 also considered and rejected an attempt to ban “The Hunger Games.”
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