Book banning has been a prevalent topic in schools across the country in recent years due to political, social and religious tensions when discussing what is considered age-appropriate for reading content on school library shelves.
Zooming into our community, Rockingham County Public Schools and Augusta County Public Schools have been plagued by more and more books taken from shelves in the last two years, causing controversy in these decisions, who’s making them and how they’re being made.
Of note, Waynesboro and Staunton have not received any book challenges in this year or last, and therefore have not followed suit with their neighbors.
For context, the Supreme Court uses the Miller Test to determine if a book is obscene with three parts: appeal to prurient interests, patently offensive depiction, and lacks serious value. Virginia generally abides by the guidelines of this test, but does not use it absolutely.
RCPS, in the last year, has temporarily banned 57 books from schools. Some of the 57 were not even currently owned by the school, but listed as a preventative measure. Nineteen of these have been permanently banned, of which more than half were not recommended by the review committee in place to be banned. RCPS also did not contact or communicate with the teachers and librarians of the schools prior to these decisions.
While ACPS seems to be headed down a similar path to Rockingham, nothing drastic has happened yet. Only four have been banned, and three of the challenges were raised by one man, Jeremy Nance. In one of the meetings that Nance spoke at, he raised an interesting point – that these books are available in public libraries and for purchase in stores and online. He isn’t proposing the books be destroyed, just requesting they aren’t offered in his childrens’ school library.
This distinction raises a bigger question about censorship. Along with obscenity scales and age-appropriateness, the key factors to consider are, who should be upholding those guidelines, and where they should be enforced. In conversation with a friend who supports these bannings, he raised a similar point – parents can offer their children whatever content they choose to in their domestic sphere of authority, but the school’s place isn’t to provide graphic content that is offensive to some individuals, or choose for a parent what their boundaries are for the media their children consume.
In some senses, this makes sense. That being said, it would be extremely difficult to execute such a change, and would likely strip a large load of books from the shelves that kids already aren’t grabbing, obvious by the falling literacy rates in K-12 schools. The material deemed appropriate for third grade should vary from the material appropriate for 11th grade, as should the committees deciding these things, and the framework they use to evaluate it.
“One of the reasons my kids attend private schools is that the public schools have no clue on age-appropriate reading recommendations,” local parent Dr. Mark Rankin said. “My daughter was recommended 1984 by a school librarian when she was 12 because she was a ‘good reader.’ The school did not possess any skill or interest in discerning whether she was emotionally ready to take on that book – and she was not. Books with adult themes should not be assigned or recommended in schools to children under the age of 16. Books ought not be banned, in general, but some books containing adult themes ought to be censored from reaching younger children. If any school feels that a book should be banned outright, the school would do better by teaching and persuading age-appropriate student audiences to select a different work.”
There has also been a reported decrease in JMU students willing to work for RCPS after hearing about how this was handled. If that, along with many who can afford it shifting to private schools, isn’t a warning sign to ACPS to do things differently, I’m not sure what is.
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