A Kentucky school district pulls books from the shelves to the smiles of the bookkeeping team

Some Ballard County residents received a smiley headline titled “Just Look What Your Tax Dollars Bought for Ballard County Public Schools” that quoted passages about sex from three books the group what it considers to be dirty.

Social media coverage made by the district Wednesday said books were removed from the high school’s library shelves because of a mailer. In a subsequent interview, Ballard County Schools Superintendent Casey Allen confirmed that the decision was a direct response to the controversial postcard.

“The plain language that was printed on a card and sent to families that weren’t about us, for me, was enough information that I needed to pull off the shelves, at least for now,” Allen said. “I know that some people will be afraid … but I don’t know every book in the two libraries that we have, and I didn’t know that these books exist. However, in these two days since that smile came out who has been against those books.”

Bill passed in 2022 – sponsored by Sen. State Rep. Jason Howell of Murray – called for school districts to be more proactive when it comes to resource issues. It also defines what type of information can be classified as “harmful to children.” The bill became law without the signature of Democratic Governor Andy Beshear.

Ballard County Schools had a method for challenges more than five years before the law came into force. Allen said there has only been one challenge since it was made, and it was pulled from the school’s library.

Works featured on the card included Susan Kuklin’s “Beyond Magenta,” a collection of interviews with young people about transgender identity; young adult mystery “Shine,” Lauren Myracle’s novel that follows a teenage girl investigating a hate crime involving the beating and death of her LGBTQ friend; and Alice Sebold’s memoir “Lucky,” in which the author describes being sexually abused as a teenager.

All three have been a challenge to library resources across the country since their publication. Kuklin wrote an essay that was shared on NPR in 2022 about his work and the challenges in it. He said that it was people who took passages from many contexts that made his book controversial.

“So what they do is they’ll pick a paragraph of the story, whether it’s bad language – because kids swear – or whether it’s someone’s life story,” he said. tell NPR. “They take it out of context, and they change it – they complain about that, that the whole book should be banned and everything in it because of a paragraph or a word there… [one] Chapter and that story and turned it into something very bad and very bad. ”

The district’s release showed the three books it removed had been in the library since at least 2016, and the oldest of the three had been on the school library’s shelf for more than two decades. It also showed that none of the three books had been reviewed recently.

Allen, a former English teacher, added that students “need to get information from all sides” and said that – although it was surprising to them … it was printed on a card and it is sent directly to people’s homes’ the meaning of the speech quoted from the person sending the message.

“It’s still a horrible language, but it’s a book written by [someone who’s] “When a rape victim is 18 years old, you can expect to have horrible language,” the director said. “So to pull a part of that story, print it on a card and send it to someone without explaining why the other person used such language, strikes me as a person who is misleading, or at least has no justification.”

The mailers were sent by Conservatives for the Commonwealth, a social welfare group with a mailing address in south-central Kentucky. It urged people to “support school choice.” The people of Kentucky will vote Change 2 in November, a ballot measure that would allow public funding to go to private education.

Allen was there someone who opposes the word of choice. He believes it will draw resources away from rural school districts like Ballard County.

Allen said in an August interview: “It’s like a constant battle to keep what we have. But it is a battle we must fight.

WPSD Local 6 find the sentence from Conservatives for the Commonwealth earlier this week about the smile and its purpose. In it, the group called the material in question “pornography.”

It read: “We wanted to make sure that citizens know that even in many rural communities, public schools are not affected by inadequate classrooms and schools.” These books were paid for with taxpayer dollars. their citizens oppose school choice, when their children are sexually abused in their schools.”

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