School library book bans come to Buncombe

Until recently, local school districts had largely avoided the national wave of book bans. Despite some activists making noise in local school board meetings last summer, there had been no formal requests to remove books from school libraries in Asheville City or Buncombe County schools.

But by November, 20 books had been challenged by a group of parents at Enka High School. They wanted the books removed from the school media center because of subject matter ranging from sex and gender identity issues to prostitution, suicide and drug use. Four of those books have been banned from the shelves of Enka High School, one of which was pulled from all Buncombe County schools.

According to comments made at school board meetings and documents acquired from BCS by Xpress, those who want books removed see their presence in school libraries as an example of school staff having too much power in their children’s education.

“School personnel and staff should not be the ones making the decisions on what modern, real-world, social and even local issues that students [and] teenagers should be exposed to, nor how they are exposed to them. That is a parent’s decision. A parent should make those decisions because the parent knows their child better than anyone,” wrote one parent in appealing Enka High’s decision to keep Shine by Lauren Myracle on the shelf. Parents’ names were redacted from the appeal documents.

The argument echoes that of the national group Moms for Liberty, a Florida-based conservative nonprofit that seeks to “unify, educate and empower parents to defend and protect their parental rights at every level of government,” according to its website. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a progressive nonprofit legal advocacy organization, has labeled Moms for Liberty as an anti-student, anti-government extremist group.

In a recent episode of newsmagazine “60 Minutes,” Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice spoke about recent book bans in Beaufort County, S.C. “Parents want to partner with their child’s schools,” she said. “But we do not co-parent with the government.”

Kim Poteat, lead organizer of the Buncombe chapter of Moms for Liberty and an administrator of the group’s private Facebook page, is one of the parents who is pushing for book removals.

“We are simply asking that parental rights be respected and parents be given the freedom to choose the timing of when their children are exposed to modern, real-world social issues based on their family beliefs, not the beliefs of educators,” she said at the March 7 Buncombe County Board of Education meeting.

After initially saying she was available for an interview with Xpress, Poteat later requested questions via email. She did not respond by press time after multiple reminders.

Per district policy, an initial request to remove materials is reviewed by a media and technology advisory committee at the school level. If a parent or community member disagrees with the school-level decision, it can be appealed to the district level for a review by the district MTAC, which is ultimately voted on by the school board.

For these challenged books, Enka High School agreed to remove three of the books from its media center, and one more was banned districtwide after an appeal of the school’s initial decision brought it before the school board. The rest of the requests were rejected.

While Doing It! Let’s Talk About Sex by Hannah Witton, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult and Wicked: Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire can be found at other, non-Enka BCS high schools, Tricks by Ellen Hopkins cannot.

Who knows best?

Those wanting certain books removed frequently noted that parents are more equipped to determine what their children are capable of processing in written materials than their teachers.

That directly counters the district’s policy on parental objections to materials.

“While input from the community may be sought, the board believes professional educators are in the best position to determine whether a particular instructional material is appropriate for the age and maturity of the students and for the subject matter being taught,” according to BCS policy 3210.

Several students who spoke to Xpress for this story said book bans should include their voices since they are the ones actually reading them.

Mitchell Cohen, a junior at Nesbitt Discovery Academy, says teenagers witness a lot of difficult subjects in their everyday lives and deserve the chance to have a say in what literature they can handle.

“There’s this idea of teenagers as stupid and hormonal. People just look at the stupid things we do and think we are too young to understand things. We’re not too young to be exposed to things outside of books. We have to deal with so many difficult things. [Some have] friends who are dying from COVID or suicide. If we are able to cope with those things, we’re old enough to cope with a book,” he says.

Multiple times, books with sexual subject matter have been referred to as pornography at school board meetings by those seeking to ban them. Sometimes, as in the case of Doing It!, the book presents sex matter-of-factly as a sexual education tool. Other times, passages with sexual acts are presented to the board out of context, even though the book is actually about something else, says Liza Porras, a senior at Nesbitt Discovery Academy.

“I just really think it says a lot about how certain people look at teens,” she says. “Sure, we haven’t really been out in the real world and everything, and we don’t know how everything works. But we aren’t these mind drones. Like, if we see like nude drawings, we’re not like, ‘Oh my God, this is so hot.’  … We have critical thinking skills.”

Plus, Porras says, since high schoolers can be assaulted, they should be allowed to read books about the topic. High school is the right time to be exposed to sexual education subject matter, Cohen adds.

The parents seeking books to be removed from schools have said they do not favor outright bans in public libraries and bookstores, but they don’t think school libraries are an appropriate place for some of this content.

“How is a book with explicit alternate gender ideologies appropriate for a school library? We should only be teaching and encouraging the learning of the basics in education — math reading, writing, science and history — not all of this sexuality and gender ideology trash talk,” writes one parent in an appeal of Beyond Magenta by Susan Kuklin to the district.

“With these kinds of books in public school libraries, you are hijacking the role of the parent to decide when their child/student is mature enough to handle these ‘modern, real-world social issues,’” the writer continues.

For Paul Curran, another Nesbitt senior, it’s better to read a book about difficult subject matter in school than be exposed to it on television, the internet or worse. At school, you have peers and teachers to discuss difficult themes with, avoiding the dark “rabbit holes” of the internet, he says.

Plus, books provide nuance and context to issues that students might otherwise be exposed to on social media, where explanations for real-world events aren’t always available, he says.

“I feel totally safe talking [about books] at school,” Curran adds.

Slippery slope

Buncombe County school board members, voting together, expressed support for all of the staff responsible for making determinations on each of the 20 books under scrutiny. When it came time to ban Tricks, board member Amy Churchill, the board’s only registered Republican, hesitated. Ultimately, the board voted 7-0 to remove the books from all school libraries.

“I really struggle with this, because I think it’s a slippery slope to start banning books, especially when it’s being used for cultural wars and talking points, political moves and being surfed from the internet to determine what books to be against without actually reading said books to determine what the concern is,” Churchill said at the Feb. 8 meeting. “I really, really have a hard time when we start talking about taking away basic freedoms.” She added that as a Christian,  she worried that the Bible could someday be challenged using the same logic that the parents were using for other books.

Attached to most of parents’ appeals were references from Booklooks.org, an independently run book review site that highlights portions of hundreds of books that reference “objectionable content.” The reviews include a profanity counter, next to which several local parents handwrote notes.

One wrote: “And we don’t want our children and teens using this language, but we put books in their school libraries that teach them to use it? That’s really messed up!”

Booklooks.org, based in Brevard County, Fla., includes a rating system created by volunteers. The site rates books from zero — “for everyone” — to 5 — for “aberrant content.” It has been cited in book ban attempts all over the country since 2022 and has been connected to Moms for Liberty groups, although the site claims not to actively seek book bans.

Instead, the site suggests “parents can use this information to provide the proper guidance to children reading any of these books. Parents can also use this information to individually, or through groups representing their interests, engage with school boards to determine what works should be made available to their children while under the custodial care of their schools,” according to the site.

Indeed, 19 of the 20 books parents asked to be removed from high school libraries are readily available at Buncombe County Public Libraries. Perfect by Hopkins is available through an interlibrary loan.

But students say making the books unavailable at their schools effectively bans them for those who don’t have transportation to a public library.

Cindy Barukh Milstein, bookseller at Firestorm Books in West Asheville, says the store will order copies of any title for anyone of any age.

Firestorm started a program housing banned children’s books from Duval County, Fla., in 2022 and is now sending them back to students whose right to read is under attack, according to its website.

Firestorm bookseller Libertie Valance says some parents see students’ access to some books as a threat to their power.

“Books can be powerful precisely because they allow their readers to explore new ideas and encounter perspectives in a space that’s unmediated by authorities. That’s important for adults, but even more important for folks in a formative stage of life, attempting to make sense of this … broken world they’ve been handed,” Valance says.

Protect them from darkness

In reviewing the appeal requests made to the district Media Technology Advisory Committee, parents express not only a desire for control over what their children have access to but also assumptions about what that access will lead to.

In an appeal of The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, a book about the shooting of an unarmed Black teenager by a white police officer, the requester suggested that students may adopt a negative view of police officers and increase their use of profanity after reading the book.

“We do not need anything in our libraries to increase racial tensions or turn our kids against police officers. There is enough of that going on in the news,” the person wrote. The book stayed.

“We should not want books in our school libraries for our minor children to read and be encouraged to be more sexually active, steal alcohol from parents’ cabinets, drink underage, do drugs, masturbate [or] curse like a sailor. This is what this book does,” one parent wrote in a request to remove More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera, which remains on the school shelves.

Valance says characters acting out in books provides starting points for adults to talk about how to process certain subject matter.

“Adults owe young people care, not control. We don’t believe that it’s effective or ethical to ban books in schools or homes. What adults can and should do is support young folks in making informed decisions about when they are ready to read challenging books and then how to think critically about what they encounter in those books, if they read them. Kids are safer when they have adults in their lives who they can trust to respond to difficult topics with openness and honesty rather than prohibitions and shame,” Valance says.

Ultimately, for some parents, it comes down to a desire to protect students from some of the world’s more disturbing realities, evident in a request to remove The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

“Children, including teenagers … are given parents to protect them from knowing evil, such as rape of a child, as portrayed graphically in this book, along with the portrayal (graphically) of suicide. We are giving our children a way to this darkness by exposing them to horrible darkness in these books!” wrote one parent.

That book stayed, too.