Texas School District Pulls Bible And Anne Frank Adaptation From Shelves
August 17, 2022The day before children return to classrooms, Keller school officials instructed campuses to remove any challenged book challenged from library shelves.
The list of books includes those that were flagged but later approved by a committee.
Among the titles recently challenged by parents and community members: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s Diary, and the Bible. Other books tell stories of LGBTQ+ and Black characters.
According to Dallas News, Jennifer Price, the district’s curriculum director, emailed principals a set of instructions Tuesday morning, along with a spreadsheet of every challenged title.
District spokesman Bryce Nieman said Keller school trustees recently approved a new policy that requires every book that was previously challenged to be reconsidered. He said he is unsure of the timeline for when the re-review process will be completed.
“Books that meet the new guidelines will be returned to the libraries as soon as it is confirmed they comply with the new policy,” associate superintendent John Allison wrote. “We hope to be able to expedite the process and return eligible books into circulation as soon as possible.”
Last year, the Texas Education Agency opened an investigation into Keller ISD because of concerns that it had sexually explicit books available to children. The district was flooded with complaints about inappropriate books, part of a national trend targeting titles about race, gender and sexuality.
Many of the books that were challenged center around gay or trans characters.
Those include I Am Jazz by Jazz Jennings, which a majority of the committee voted to allow the book to stay in a campus library, and All Boys Aren’t Blue by George Johnson about what it’s like growing up as a queer Black man. The committee agreed this book should also remain in high schools.
Several of the books challenged in Keller appeared on a list circulated by Representative Matt Krause last year, sent to superintendents in a letter listing more than 800 titles. He asked officials to identify whether those books were in schools, where they were located, and how much money was spent on them.
The News found that of the first 100 titles listed, 97 were written by women, people of color, or LGBTQ+ authors.
Other North Texas districts are similarly embroiled in fights over books.
Representative Jared Patterson, R-Frisco, submitted challenges for nearly two dozen books in Frisco ISD, which he labeled “graphic and obscene,” saying many of them had already been pulled in nearby districts.
The titles he flagged included All Boys Aren’t Blue and Ashley Hope Pérez’s Out of Darkness, a love story featuring a Mexican American girl and an African American boy leading up to the 1937 New London school explosion.
Advocates for free speech have watched the Texas school districts’ actions with alarm. Children need access to books with diverse characters and storylines so they can both see themselves reflected in literature as well as developing empath by seeing others' experiences.
In Keller, “the sweeping attempt to remove these titles from classrooms and libraries on the eve of a new school year is an appalling affront to students’ First Amendment rights,” Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression at the nonprofit advocacy organization PEN America, said in a statement. “It is virtually impossible to run a school or a library that purges books in response to any complaint from any corner.”
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