Reactions to the Bay County School Board’s recent decision to ban “The Fighting Ground” by Avi continue to surface.
There was this letter to the editor in Thursday’s paper.
Here’s what I said about it last week, and in the comments there you’ll find a letter from School Board member Pat Sabiston, one of three who voted to pull the book from school libraries.
Rosie O’Bourke, whom many regular readers of this blog will know, sent the following via email:
Extra, extra, read all about it – or not. The dark specter of censorship rises again in Bay County and is efficiently tucked under the proposed school closings in the meeting agenda and pushed through with little notice in the summer, while school is out. It’s brilliant!
For those of you who don’t remember the times of the last censorship battle, you may want to read Gloria Pipkin’s “At the School House Gate”. Back in 1986-87 Bay County became the laughing stock of the country when then superintendent Leonard Hall banned 64 books including such classics as Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” and “The Merchant of Venice”, and novels such as “The Old Man and the Sea” and “The Red Badge of Courage”.
There were articles in the New York Times (see “Florida Officials Yield on Book Ban” published May 15, 1987) in the Wall Street Journal and in the Washington Post. There were interviews in the Oprah Show. A young reporter’s porch was bombed with an improvised explosive, fake bombs appeared inside teachers cars, and the lives of children whose parents chose to fight the book banning were threatened by telephone calls in the middle of the night. It wasn’t until a lawsuit was filed on constitutional grounds that the school board changed its policy to agree with the superintendent.
Still and to this day, there are books banned from that episode.
This time, however, it’s more insidious. “The Fighting Ground” is not a book that teachers are requiring students to read in the classroom. This is a library book, for goodness sake! No one is required to read it. And yet, one parent has read two pages from it and decided that the rest of the Bay County children must not be allowed to read it at all. Even more, three school board members, Donna Allen, John McFatter and Pat Sabiston voted to ban it from all Bay School District library shelves without even reading it. Thank goodness for Ginger Littleton and Johnny Brock, who both gave serious thought to the matter and who listened to the district’s book review committee’s recommendation in voting to keep the books on the library shelves.
As for the book, captured and dying soldiers don’t say “gee, wow, I hope they come back to save us soon!” They are desperate. They use desperate language. What an excellent opportunity to discuss the power of language with your child! Sheltering your children from the horrors of war will simply create a generation that glorifies war and justifies it for just about any reason.
The book is banned until June 30. Bay County parents, grandparents and others that care about civil liberties and constitutional rights should keep their eyes and ears open. There are those who will try to take your children’s first amendment rights away. And for those of us who have already fought this battle once before, we fight it at the polls as well, and we vote.
Rosie O’Bourke, Bay County grandparent
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Thanks for joining the discussion, Rosie. How about the rest of you?