Censorship Roundup

By Staff -- School Library Journal, 6/1/2006

Gwinnett County, GA: The Gwinnett County Public Schools recently upheld a decision by a district review panel to keep J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series on school library shelves, despite a parent’s complaint that the books promote witchcraft. Last fall, Laura Mallory, a mother of three, claimed that the series sanctioned witchcraft and demonic activity, according to the Gwinnett Daily Post. A school district review panel, comprised of parents, community members, and school staff, initially voted to keep the books, but Mallory appealed the decision to the school board. “I want to protect children from evil, not fill their minds with it,” Mallory said at a public hearing on April 20. “Harry Potter teaches children and adults that witchcraft is OK for children.”

Salmon, ID: Salmon School District board members have rejected a minister’s request that Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (Pantheon, 1974) be banned from Salmon High School’s freshman English curriculum. The book, which topped the American Library Association’s most challenged books in 2004, is about a teen who refuses to sell chocolate bars for a fund-raiser at an all-boys Catholic school. “The book is anti-Christian,” Rev. Timothy Gordish, who led the effort to ban it from ninth-grade classrooms, told the Idaho Falls Post Register. “There are some things you cannot discuss by law in public schools, and they have crossed that line.”

The school board voted in March to temporarily ban the book, but on April 5 a review panel made up of administrators, teachers, and a school librarian said the title should be allowed, reports the Idaho Falls Post Register.