Anatomy of a book banning
Perspective by Dave Eggers
In early May I discovered that my book “The Circle” had been pulled from high school reading lists in Rapid City, S.D. It was one of five books — four novels and a memoir — that were deemed inappropriate for high school seniors. Copies of these books had been bought in the spring of 2021, meant to be read by seniors in the fall of 2021. But upon discovering brief sexual passages in each book, school officials pulled the titles from classrooms and even the schools’ libraries. Officials eventually decided that these books, most of which had never been unpacked from their boxes and were in mint condition, should be destroyed.
This was my first time having a book I’d written banned, but two of the books, Stephen Chbosky’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” and Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home,” are routinely assigned to high school students in the United States and are routinely challenged. “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” a coming-of-age novel that has sold millions of copies, features a few scenes of awkward teenage sexual exploration. “Fun Home,” an illustrated memoir about Bechdel’s complicated childhood and her coming out as gay, includes a few cartoon panels of two young women engaged in sex. Both books had been offered to Rapid City high school students in English classes for many years before 2021, without controversy.
But the coronavirus pandemic and an influx of new school board members have drastically changed the atmosphere for teachers in the district. I visited Rapid City in May and spoke to 25 teachers spread across the district’s three high schools. Uniformly, they said that their work had become far more difficult in the last two years, and that the book ban was yet one more sign that their jobs were becoming untenable. At the school board meeting I attended, on May 17, multiple speakers lamented the “mass exodus” of teachers. There are currently 157 vacant positions in a district that employs 1,680. Eighty-eight of the open positions are for classroom teachers. Parents and students say the district is “disintegrating” and “imploding.” Jill Haugo, a nine-year teacher at Central High School, said she has never seen anything like this. “Teachers are breaking their contracts in the middle of the year and just leaving.”
How all this happened is instructive. In fact, it might be a blueprint for how any school district can be overtaken by the narrow interests of people and groups without a direct stake in the schools. One such person is the president of the Rapid City school board, Kate Thomas.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/24/dave-eggers-book-bans-south-dakota/