(UPDATED: January 20, 2015) Delaware's Appoquinimink School District (ASD) has had its fair share of attention lately, starting with the celebration of Appoquinimink High School (AHS) librarian, Christine Payne, for her win in the 2014 "I Love My Librarian" Awards on December 2, 2014 to the more recent proposal for the district to implement parental permission slips for required and recreational reading (borrowed from the school library) presented at a December 9 school board meeting, drafted by the district’s director of secondary education, Ray Gravuer. At the board meeting, nine parents spoke up about the measure for permission slips, the majority speaking against the policy. The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) also came out strongly against the permission slip measure in a letter, dated January 9, 2015 and addressed to President Norm Abrams of the Appoquinimink School District Board of Education, which states that the NCAC's "primary concern is the proposed adoption of a 'rating' system, under which certain books would be flagged for special attention and parental consent requirements." “There has been concern and controversy within the district about the appropriateness of books and media sources,” said Gravuer to the Middleton Transcript. “Just to be clear, we are not banning books or censoring books.” However, says Tony Valenzuela, the executive director of Lambda Literary, an organization dedicated to LGBTQ literature, to SLJ, “…Ray Gravuer claims this proposed change in policy offers parents ‘choice’ in what their high school children read, [however] the resulting effect will be censorship of authors, including LGBTQ authors, whose books deal with issues many young people are dealing with in their lives." Valenzuela goes on to say he hopes “the Appoquinimink School Board trusts their teachers and respects their students enough to navigate the important, often live-saving, work of authors of young adult literature." According to a report from the Middletown Transcript, the slide into implementing permission slips had originated "from an incident that occurred at the end of the last school year [in November 2014], when a male student chose to partake in an extracurricular literature circle led by a female librarian at Appoquinimink High School." The book group, run by AHS librarian Payne, was reading Identical (S. & S., 2008) by Ellen Hopkins, which is a story about identical female twins, one of whom is sexually abused by her father. The male student, who is the son of the senior pastor of the Friendship Baptist Church in Glasgow, DE, told his father about the book's content. "Soon after, [the pastor] began circulating a petition to require the school district to adopt a process for ensuring that all material was age appropriate," says the Middletown Transcript.

AHS senior Rachel Wagner. Image courtesy of Rachel Wanger

What happened next, writes AHS senior, Rachel Wagner, to SLJ in an email, is the following: "On November 10, I became aware of a parent petition that was being circulated amongst...parents. This petition, as I read it, aimed to censor any novels with any sort of controversial text: eating disorders, self harm, sexual content of any sort and descriptions of genitalia, drug and alcohol usage, etc. The petition from the parents had a lot of 'etc's...' which made me think, 'What the heck does that mean?'" Upon discovery of the parental petition, Wagner created a petition opposing it, which got 500 signatures in five days. (Wagner also created a Facebook page called "Appoquinimink School District Students for the Freedom to Read" with some other students.) She' tells SLJ she'd planned, with other students, to present her petition at the November 2014 board meeting, but upon discovering that the parents who had circulated the petition to ban material were not going to present their petition to the board, decided against it for the time being. At the January 13 board meeting, Wagner, who spoke at the meeting on behalf of herself and the students of Freedom to Read, thanking the "school district for changing their decision and developing a policy that simply raised awareness about the policies that were already in place," says to SLJ in an email that Gravuer "redeemed himself" by standing by his decisions made with the Books Procedure Committee and "stated that we have professional teachers in the district who we need to trust, and we need to respect their abilities to choose literature." The recommendations for the district's Book Procedure policy did not include any reference to permission slips, however they did include (as is already the case at the high school-level in the district) for parents to be required to sign off on the syllabus that they have received and accept the terms of the syllabus. And for voluntary reading (books borrowed from the library), the following statement was recommended to be added to the policy: "The district believes that it is every parent’s right to parent based upon their personal values, the district believes that the onus for controlling the self-elected use of material must reside in the communication and relationship of the parent/guardian and child. Therefore, it is up to the parent to monitor the material that their minor child voluntary [withdraws from the] school/district." The fly in the ointment during the meeting, explains Wagner, was when a parent (the pastor whose son had read Identical in Payne's book group) addressed the crowd, calling Payne, along with two other staff members who'd defended the use of the book, "smug," saying that they'd 'threatened to sic the ACLU' on him." "He explained sexual scenes from Identical out loud [and] out of context," writes Wagner in an email, "and said that books with sexual content have no place in a school. (Despite the fact that a large number of Delaware teens are sexually assaulted by the time they are 18, and these books offer solace and guidance)." At some point, Wagner states, she grew emotional and was escorted out of the room by concerned adults, missing the end of the meeting. However, the fight over permission slips has concluded. ASD Superintendent Matthew Burrows put out a statement, according to a January 13 article:  "After listening to comments from our community and convening a committee with student, teacher, librarian, and administrative representation, we feel that we have policies and procedures in place that adequately address the needs of stakeholders." "I think that's good news," says Kathleen MacRae, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware, to a local publication. "I think the policies they have now respect the educational process and the constitutional rights of students."