Correction: Harper Cridland-Hughes is a student in Greenville, not Beaufort, as it says in the audio story.
Deciding what is and is not appropriate for children to read in school falls upon local school districts, until it doesn’t. If parents concerned that materials in public school libraries are inappropriate – typically because of what they consider to be too-mature content – they can ask that the school board review the materials.
If the school board deems the materials to be age and developmentally appropriate, but the parents are unsatisfied with that decision, those parents can petition the South Carolina Board of Education to review the materials.
Most recently, this is what led to four often-challenged books – Flamer, by Mike Curato; Push, by Sapphire; All Boys Aren’t Blue, by George M. Johnson; and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky – being removed from school library shelves across the state. The Beaufort County School District had deemed the books appropriate for their libraries, but a complaint to the state BOE led to the title being removed from every public school library in South Carolina.
That decision came on Feb. 4.
At the BOE meeting in Columbia that day, advocates implored the board to reconsider. Advocates called the removals a book ban and said that by taking book access away from schoolkids, the board was cutting off access to ideas its members don’t like, effectively speaking for every parent in the state.
Board members bristled at the accusations.
“It is very disturbing for people to make huge leaps in logic to … say that we're banning books,” said Cheryl Abrams Collier, a college English professor and member of the BOE’s Instructional Materials Review Committee, or IMRC. “The committee is not banning books. That is not the purpose of this committee.”
Rather, Collier said, the IMRC is keeping kids away from books its members fear might be harmful for kids to read. Each of the books pulled on Feb. 4 contains sexual content. Three of the books deal with themes of abuse.
Reading advocates counter that the books allow kids to process difficult situations by finding characters they see themselves through.
But while adults go back and forth about what kids should be able to read in school, kids themselves say they would rather lawmakers and officeholders listen to them.
On Feb. 11, a group of South Carolina students representing DAYLO, the Diversity Awareness Youth Literacy Organization, visited the Statehouse to talk with lawmakers about the importance of book access.
Students like Harper Cridland-Hughes, 16, who goes to high school in Greenville, said she wants lawmakers to know that censoring books in any way is more harmful than helpful.
“I know what they’re saying and that they think they are protecting kids,” Harper said. “But kids are really smart, and they’re all creative. They’re all their own people, and restricting books is just shutting them all down.”
Harper also said she’s unconvinced that adults making these kinds of decisions on kids’ behalf are actually doing it for the kids.
“While they say they’re doing it for the kids, they’re really doing it for themselves, to kind of protect themselves from ideas that might be different,” she said. “They’re not really thinking of if from an actual kid’s perspective.”
Emily Alaia, 15, goes to high school in Beaufort. Like Harper, Emily said talk of protecting kids from themselves is misguided.
“When they say they’re protecting the kids, maybe in their minds they’re protecting the kids, but I feel like the kids are very unprotected,” Emily said. “They aren’t being able to show their true belief and learn empathy through reading.”
She said she found herself in the main character of the book Suicide Notes, by Michael Thomas Ford. She said 15-year-old Jeff found a path through adversity in a way that allowed her to know how to talk to her parents about things she was going through herself. She worries that kids who could benefit from learning about themselves through reading others’ stories won’t even know that a helpful story even exists.
One of the counters to parents’ – and kids’ – concerns about censorship is that all titles banned from school libraries are not actually banned; that they are still available in stores and online.
But Patrick Good, 17, says this argument doesn’t work for him.
“I go to a private school, so I do have access to some of these books,” Patrick said. “Also, I have parents who do very well for themselves and I’d be able to order books off Amazon whenever I really feel like it. But that’s not everyone.”
Patrick says he volunteered at a school district in Beaufort County where more than half of students live below the poverty line.
“I know a good portion of those kids won’t be able to go home and order a half-dozen books off Amazon every other month,” he said.
The end game for the students representing DAYLO is to get state lawmakers to listen, they hope enough to get some kind of state legislation passed to protect access to books in school libraries. They also support proposed House Bill 3264, sponsored by Democrats Heather Bauer and Seth Rose, both of Richland County, which promotes critical thinking and media literacy in schools.
The kids know it’s a big ask. But, as Patrick said, “I feel like I have to do something.”
