Censorship Roundup

Carroll County, MD: School Superintendent Charles Ecker recently ordered the removal of Carolyn Mackler’s The Earth, My Butt and Other Big Round Things (Candlewick, 2003) from the library shelves of all 16 middle and high schools at the request of a group of parents and students. Ecker’s decision overrode the recommendations of a materials review committee to keep the Printz award-winning title for excellence in young adult literature, even though the appeals process designates the school board as the final arbiter of book challenges. Protests immediately followed, including a petition drive started by school teens, to reinstate the coming-of-age story about an overweight girl. “I think it’s an exceptional book for families to read,” says Ecker. “But I think some of the language is inappropriate.” Ecker, who has agreed to reconsider the book’s removal, is meeting with media specialists and attorneys and hoped to have a final answer by the end of December 2005. As for Mackler, she’s excited about the students’ response to the ban. “They’re letting their voices be heard,” says the New York–based writer. “[The book] is about a teenager learning to stand up for herself, so it’s great that teenagers are doing that same thing for the book.”

Apache Junction, AZ: Responding to a complaint by the grandmother of a sixth grader to explicit language about date rape in Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower (MTV, 1999), School Superintendent Tom Horne wrote a cautionary memo about the book to schools statewide, leading some to remove the title from their libraries. While Horne didn’t specifically call for the book’s removal, he did suggest in his November 22 note to principals and county superintendents that they reconsider keeping the book—about a 10th grader navigating through the teen world—since he believed Accelerated Reader had inappropriately labeled it as reading for fourth graders. “There’s a page of description of forced oral sex,” says Horne, who admits to not reading the book in its entirety. “That’s a little much for a 12-year-old.”

Tacoma, WA: Superintendent Patti Banks of the University Place School District has rescinded a decision to remove Brent Hartinger’s gay teen novel Geography Club (HarperTempest, 2003) from high school library collections, following parental complaints about a section involving a gay teen meeting an online acquaintance in the park. The book, however, will not remain on junior high school shelves. The Tacoma News Tribune reported that Banks wrote to the complainants saying that the district wanted “to send a strong consistent message to all our students that meeting individuals via the Internet is extremely high-risk behavior.” The book is about a student who believes he’s the only gay teen in his high school until he meets others through an online chat room and forms the Geography Club—a name meant to sound so boring that no one else would want to join. Hartinger is encouraged by the dialog launched by the ban. “The more we talk about these things, the better we all are,” he says. “These are questions that help us decide what sort of community we will be.”