The chair of the Cabarrus County, North Carolina, Board of Education ordered its teenage student interns to leave a public meeting this week before a board member read an oral-sex scene aloud from an award-winning teen novel.
“This is the kind of crap that’s in our schools, and you think this is OK?” board vice-chair Laura Blackwell said during Monday night’s work session, referring to a passage in John Green’s 2005 “Looking for Alaska.”
Blackwell didn’t say to whom she was directing her question, but the board was discussing a letter from 132 parents concerned that the school board intended to ban the book and others from school libraries.
Blackwell said two copies of “Looking for Alaska” remain missing from libraries and are likely “under some kid’s mattress.”
The session was broadcast live on the district’s YouTube channel, meaning anyone could watch the video on their phone — including the teen interns, and still can. The Charlotte Observer reviewed a recording of the meeting that’s on the school district website.
Letter from parents
Blackwell was reacting to an email sent to the board Sept. 9 from the parents worried that the board is about to enact policies that would make it easier to ban books and learning materials someone deems offensive.
The letter said school administrators removed several books with “minoritized subjects, characters, and/or authors” from “classroom syllabi and individual teacher libraries” last spring. The books were removed with input from school board members and Superintendent John Kopicki, according to the letter. The letter doesn’t name the books.
“To be clear, we are not in favor of book bans, removals, or relocations under any circumstance because we trust the rigorous process by which books (and other supplementary learning materials) are initially brought into our schools by experts in the field of education,” the parents’ letter said.
The school board displayed the letter on a large screen at Monday’s meeting.
“We demand that full transparency be built into the policies prior to their adoption,” the letter said.
Board chair: Book ‘will be the example’
Board Chairwoman Holly Grimsley denied at Monday’s meeting that book banning was behind a months-long effort by a board committee to standardize policies on how books are selected and how school officials should respond to complaints about books and materials.
No books have been banned, she said, and “policy” is the sole purpose of the literature and supplemental materials committee, Grimsley said.
“The process was either not being followed or was followed inconsistently at different campuses,” she said.
Yet Grimsley acknowledged during the session that school administrators removed some books in the spring until the board approves final policy revisions, likely in November, she said.
Grimsley didn’t name the books, but she insisted that the board has been fully transparent about its intentions.
“There could not be more transparency involving this process than anything else that we’ve done,” she said.
Still, Grimsley said she took issue with one of the demands in the parents’ letter, that no books ever be banned.
“It’s broad, and it’s broad in a way that we need people to be really clear why some things have been pulled for review,” Grimsley said before referring to “Looking for Alaska” without naming the book.
Blackwell, who chairs the board’s literature committee, held up a copy of the book during the meeting.
“This particular book is going to be one that will be the example and start the process for this literature committee to take a look at,” Grimsley said.
Leave the room, teens
The scene at issue involves what Green, the author, has called “a very awkward and ultimately failed attempt at oral sex, which is described in very cold and clinical language.”
Grimsley initially invited students under age 17 to leave the room if they preferred not to listen to the passage, but she ordered them to leave after board member Keshia Sandidge objected.
Four or five interns were in the room, including a couple of students who may be 18, Grimsley told the Observer on Thursday.
None of the students objected to the board before leaving, according to the recording.
“I have a 15-year-old, and I would want someone to call me and let me make a decision as to whether I want my child to stay in here,” Sandidge said. “I do not feel comfortable leaving children in here who are under the age of 17.”
Only Rob Walter on the seven-member school board questioned the need to read the passage aloud, saying he saw no reason.
People need “to understand the severity of” what’s in the book, Grimsley replied.
“It’s very graphic, it’s very detailed,” Grimsley warned the audience, “but it’s very important that you understand that it’s not over-exaggeration (by reading the passage aloud). This is what was in some of our libraries, and it is the reason it needs to be reviewed.”
Blackwell read the passage after Grimsley asked each member if they were OK with that.
Board member Denise Adcock said parents who included their names in the letter of concern represented a “very small” percentage of the district’s estimated 70,000 parents, “less than 1 percent.”
Said board member Carolyn Carpenter: “I do not feel the majority of parents in our community would want their children subjected to that type of material.”
Author reacts to book bans
The Cabarrus board would be 17 years late to the game of efforts to ban Green’s book, if the board voted in the months ahead to permanently remove “Looking for Alaska” from shelves.
From parents to elected officials, people in various states have demanded the book’s removal from school libraries, according to its author and multiple media reports.
The book won the Michael L. Printz Award from the American Library Association in 2006.
In 2015, “Looking for Alaska” reached No. 1 on the American Library Association’s list of most challenged books, “meaning someone requested to have the book removed from a school or library,” The Guardian newspaper reported at the time.
More complaints than “the Holy Bible,” which finished sixth that year, Green said on YouTube in 2015. “To be fair, the Bible does contain its fair share of explicit passages,” he said.
Using air quotes, he said on YouTube that his book “had been challenged and banned around the country for ‘offensive language’ and ‘sexually explicit’ descriptions.”
‘Text is meaningless without context’
“I suppose this is a kind of an honor,” Green quipped in the 2015 video. “I mean, ‘Looking for Alaska’ contained the very same offensive language and sexually explicit descriptions 10 years ago, but was much less likely to be banned because, you know, not very many people had read it.”
More seriously, he said, “text is meaningless without context, and what usually happens with ‘Looking for Alaska’ is that a parent shows one particular page to an administrator, and the book gets banned without anyone who objects to it having read any more than that one particular page.”
Green said the controversial passage contains just one adjective: “nervous.”
“Teenagers are critically engaged and thoughtful readers,” Green said in the video. “They do not read ‘Looking for Alaska’ and think, ‘I should go and have some aggressively un-erotic oral sex.’ And they also don’t read ‘The Outsiders’ and think, ‘I should join a gang,’ or read ‘Divergent’ and think, ‘I should jump onto moving trains.’”
“So far as I can tell, that kind of narrow, prescriptive reading seems only to happen inside the offices of superintendents,” Green said.
Ban sought in author’s hometown
Yet complaints continue, Green said.
Just this week came reports of a school board candidate campaigning on a ban “Looking for Alaska” platform in Orange County, Florida, where Green grew up and attended school.
With his wry sense of humor, Green responded with a faux-plea on TikTok: “Please don’t ban my books in my hometown. It’s really upsetting for my mom. She has to deal with all these people talking to her on Facebook now.”
Read the book first, former longtime Cabarrus County school board member Cyndy Fertenbaugh told the Observer she’d tell the board.
“The board should not be banning anything they have not read in its entirety for the context of the entire book,” she said.
“But most important, they need to follow the policy” and not be indiscriminately removing books from school libraries, she said.
Board chair: ‘He is a great author’
“I’ve read the book all the way through,” board Chair Grimsley told the Observer on Thursday. “I knew I needed to.”
“Unfortunately, (Green’s) recognizing in his own words that two pages divert attention from the intent behind the book.”
“He is a great author,” Grimsley said. “He could have left (the sexually explicit act) unsaid. He really is a great author. He’s actually visited Cabarrus County.”
Blackwell didn’t immediately reply to an email from the Observer on Thursday.
Grimsley said the message that school board members are conveying to the public “is that these books and supplemental materials are being paid for with taxpayer dollars. That’s where the school board gets caught up in this.”
Regarding youth under the age of 17, whether it’s their parents or the restrictions on R-rated movies, “there’s somebody above them monitoring what they’re exposed to,” she said. “We have a lot of places providing those stop checks,” and that includes their schools, she said.
