From masks to book banning, conservatives take on educators
CHEYENNE, Wyo. – A recent Wyoming school board meeting was again packed with opponents of mask mandates when things took an abrupt turn and a parent started reading aloud sexually explicit passages from a book available in school libraries.
“Parents like myself had no idea this stuff was here,” the parent, Shannon Ashby, told trustees of Laramie County School District No. 1 in the capital city.
The push to remove objectionable books from school libraries is part of a renewed conservative interest in public education as a political issue since the start of the pandemic. Parents who first packed school board meetings to express their opposition to mask mandates and other COVID-19 measures have since broadened their focus to other issues they say clash with conservative values, including teachings about social justice, gender, race and history.
Such issues played a key role in last month’s Virginia governor’s election and are now poised to be in the Republican spotlight in the 2022 midterms.
“If you put pictures to the material that was read, our superintendent would be in jail for trafficking in kiddie porn,” said Darin Smith, a local attorney and former Republican congressional candidate whose wife is on the school board. “I would never have known these extreme leftists that are controlling our school district had I not gone to voice my opposition to the masking.”
The award-winning book Ashby wants pulled from Cheyenne high school and middle schools, “Monday’s Not Coming,” by Tiffany D. Jackson, is a novel about the mysterious disappearance of a Black teenager. Supporters say it contains important messages about topics such as poverty, child abuse and friendship, though it does includes scenes such as a boy and a girl having sex on a teacher’s desk.
Ashby also read allusions to sex acts in “Traffick,” by Ellen Hopkins, a novel about teenagers victimized by sex trafficking.
Similar disputes over public school curricula and books arose recently in Virginia, where with help from former Vice President Mike Pence they became a major issue in Republican Glenn Youngkin’s successful campaign for governor.
They’ve also been a political issue in the Carolinas and Texas while school officials in Kansas pulled almost 30 books from shelves after a complaint but soon returned them.
In Utah, the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union opened an investigation in November after a suburban Salt Lake City district removed several books including “The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison, pending investigation into a parent complaint. Other books that have been the subject of complaints in the city’s schools include titles with LGBTQ characters and plot lines.
“There is a wave of well-funded, well-organized attacks in our schools and looking to remove library books from the shelves,” Utah Education Association President Heidi Matthews said.
Library organizations are pushing back, pointing out many of the books in question depict struggles of minorities. Efforts to remove them send a message to minority youth that their views don’t matter, said Deborah Caldwell Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.
“It’s a terrible message to send to young people,” Stone said. “For me, it’s just astonishing that so many groups that use ‘liberty’ in their names, that claim that they’re all for freedom and the individual right to exercise freedom, resort so quickly to use censorship.”
Ashby belongs to Moms for Liberty, a conservative group that says it challenges “short-sighted and destructive” policies in public schools.
Wyoming’s top education official, however, questioned whether the book disputes are a fundamentally conservative cause.
“Labeling this as a ‘conservative’ issue is a disservice to parents and their children. We should embrace parents wanting to engage with their children’s education, not label them,” Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Balow, a Republican, said in a statement Thursday.
In September, Balow joined Wyoming’s Republican legislative leaders in supporting proposed state legislation to counter the teaching of “critical race theory,” which has become a catch-all term for efforts to teach that systemic racism remains a persistent problem in the U.S. Opponents of those efforts say they are divisive and counterproductive.