Parents Wage Anti-Porn Campaign Against Schools

PABBIS (Parents Against Bad Books in Schools), a parents group in suburban Washington, D.C., is waging a particularly harsh antipornography campaign against the Fairfax County (VA) Public Schools—and librarians are getting the brunt of it.

"Librarians on the [reconsideration] committees have been verbally attacked," says Linda Vretos, a librarian at the district's Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Vretos is referring to PABBIS member Kathy Stohr, who has filed challenges on the group's behalf.

According to Stohr, PABBIS wants teachers to give parents written notice of any sexual depictions or graphic violence in books students might read in class. She would also like a rating system for library books, along the lines of movie ratings. A few months ago, school board members supportive of PABBIS asked the district to come up with new guidelines on selecting school materials. In response, the district superintendent, Daniel A. Domenech, has proposed new regulations, saying parents should be given a booklist outlining any required reading. He also proposed having review panels in each school look at classroom materials, with an eye toward "cultural and ethnic differences, language or word choice, religion, disabilities, violence, and implied or explicit sexual situations." But Stohr says the guidelines stop short of saying that books with certain material should be excluded from schools.

Since 1999, PABBIS has challenged three books in school libraries: Druids by Morgan Llywelyn, Daughters of Eve by Lois Duncan, and The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. In each instance, a district committee voted to retain the book, but PABBIS appealed to the school board. The board, in turn, voted to remove Druids and Daughters of Eve from middle-school libraries and to restrict The Pillars of the Earth to high-school students in 10th grade and above.

Paul Regnier, the district's coordinator of community relations, says of PABBIS: "They want a rating system for all books so parents can be alerted that there's sex or violence in a book. So far we have not agreed to do that."