FL School Board Wins Battle to Keep ‘Vamos a Cuba' Off Library Shelves
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By SLJ Staff -- School Library Journal, 11/18/2009
School board members in Miami have won their fight to keep Vamos a Cuba (Heineman, 2001) off school library shelves because the book paints too rosy a picture of life in the communist nation.
The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this week declined to take up the case of the controversial book by Alta Schreier, letting stand a 2–1 decision earlier this year by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that the school board's decision to remove the book was not censorship in violation of the First Amendment. Instead, the Atlanta-based appeals court said the school board was seeking to remove the book because it contained substantial factual inaccuracies.
“It is a sad day for free speech in our great nation,” says JoNel Newman, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida cooperating counsel. “This is a dangerous precedent, and a huge leap backwards in the battle against censorship. The aftershocks may be felt in public school libraries across the country.”
The ACLU filed suit against the Miami-Dade County School Board in June 2006 to fight the decision by the board to ban Vamos a Cuba and its English-language version A Visit to Cuba, which are part of a series of 24 books seeking to introduce young readers, aged four to eight, to other countries.
In 2006, Pat Scales, president of the Association of Library Services for Children (ALSC) testified on behalf of the ACLU, saying that children aged four to eight “cognitively really don’t ‘get’ the concept of government.”
"The Miami-Dade School Board violated the right of school children to have access to the marketplace of ideas in their school libraries," says Howard Simon, ACLU of Florida executive director. "These books were removed under the guise of 'inaccuracies,' but the real reason they were removed was because the books ran afoul of the political orthodoxy of a majority of the school board members. If that is to become the new standard for censoring books from public library shelves, the ACLU may be immersed in censorship battles for years to come."
The school district removed the book series from library shelves after a school board attorney, two school review committees, and the district's superintendent all recommended that the books remain untouched.
“It will now be the responsibility of school officials to maintain a marketplace of ideas in our public schools rather than ban books based on religious, political, and personal views,” ACLU’s Simon says. “The Miami-Dade School Board has the power to retain these books, including the 22 books that were never the subject of a complaint or a review by a committee.”
Interestingly, Theresa Chmara, consul for the Freedom to Read Foundation, said earlier this month at the American Association for School Librarians Conference, “Let’s hope the Supreme Court doesn’t take on the Miami case because with the current court makeup it may endanger” the 1982 Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico case in which the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment limits the power of local school boards to remove library books from junior high schools and high schools.
