Teen Mags Deemed Inappropriate for Middle Schoolers

Staff -- School Library Journal, 4/1/1998

Young girls looking for the latest issue of Seventeen will no longer find it in the Hauppauge (NY) Middle School library. They won't find Teen or YM, either.

Despite the recommendation of a district review committee to keep the magazines on the shelves, the school superintendent in this Long Island community ordered them removed. He said their explicit discussions of sex were "not age appropriate" for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders.

The controversy started when a parent protested her seventh-grade daughter's access to the magazines' frank discussions about sex. The Board of Education voted unanimously in favor of the superintendent's decision at a meeting last month attended by more than 100 parishioners of a local Roman Catholic church. The church pastor spoke out against the magazines in the church bulletin.