Marietta City school board votes to ban 23 books from libraries

By Jasmina Alston and Joshua Skinner

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    MARIETTA, Georgia (WANF) — The Marietta City school board voted overwhelmingly to ban 23 books from library shelves Tuesday night, part of a wave of book banning across metro Atlanta and the United States.

The school board voted 6-1 to remove the books for sexually explicit content.

Jeff Hubbard, with the Cobb County Association of Educators, said district leaders used a collaborative process to go through thousands of books at the high school.

According to Hubbard, some parents, who believe this should be a parent control issue, will still be concerned.

“Whether or not they feel their child of the high school level would be mature enough to handle adult material and could they have the right to determine whether their child reads this or not,” Hubbard said. “So I think that’s where you’re going to have the competing ideas at the board meeting.”

While many of the banned books do not have large followings, others, like “City of Thieves” and “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” have been bestsellers for over two decades.

17-year-old Marietta High School junior Bella Gantt spoke out against the ban. “Wallflower” is her favorite book.

“We’re about to go to college, and they’re preparing us to be the future, “ Gantt said. “We need to be ready to face the realities that we are going to see and be able to develop not just as students but as humans.”

The banned books cover a range of subjects, from finding one’s sexuality to surviving during World War II. All have what the board calls “sexually explicit content”.

For parents like Becky Simmons, it’s a much-needed change to catch up with media ratings.

“Why do we have standards for what they can search on the internet and what movies they see, but we don’t have a system for what’s in the books,” Simmons said.

While Gantt admitted that many of the books are not appropriate for young kids, she bristled at the idea that the list seemed to arbitrarily choose some books while leaving others with graphic sexual content off.

“There are also several books that are still on the shelves,” Gantt said. “‘Like To Kill a Mockingbird,’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ ‘It by Stephen King,’ and ‘The Color Purple.’”

Simmons said this is the first stroke, and she hopes the school board takes a look at other books in the future.

“It is their responsibility to have standards set for what is going to be good for our education,” she said.

The opposition to the ruling was cordial.

“I think that people just do whatever the political move is,” Gant said.

The final decision was never in doubt.

“If we take one book out, we can put another book in, and everything will all work out just fine,” speaker Donna Lewis said.

But there is worry about what’s next, how far the bans will go and how to decide what’s safe and what’s right.

“You can try as hard as you want,” one speaker said. “But there will never be a right way to do the wrong thing.”

The books that were removed are:

“Monday’s Not Coming” by Tiffany Jackson “Beyond Magenta” by Susan Kuklin “More Happy Than Not” by Ada Silvera “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chobsky “Crank” by Ellen Hopkins “The Infinite Moment of Us” by Lauren Myracle “13 Reasons Why” by Josh Asher “City of Thieves” by David Benioff “Juliet Takes a Breath” by Gabby Rivera “A Court of Mist and Fury” by Sarah J. Maas “A Court of Thorn and Roses” by Sarah J. Maas “A Court of Wings and Ruin” by Sarah J. Maas “A Court of Frost and Starlight” by Sarah J. Maas “Lucky” by Alice Sebold “Tricks” by Ellen Hopkins “Blankets” by Craig Thompson “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson “This Book Is Gay” by Juno Dawson “I Love You, Beth Cooper” by Larry Doyle “It Ends With Us” by Colleen Hoover “Identical” by Ellen Hopkins “Grasshopper Jungle: A History” by Andrew Smith “The Casual Vacancy” by J.K. Rowling

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