NEW YORK (AP) – Until a year ago, Stephana Ferrell’s political activism was limited to the occasional letter to elected officials.
Then came her local school board meeting in Orange County, Florida and an objection raised to Maia Kobabe’s graphic novel “Gender Queer: A Memoir.” And the county’s decision last fall to remove it from high school shelves.
“By winter break, we realized this was happening all over the state and needed to start a project to rally parents to protect access to information and ideas in school,” says Ferrell, a mother of two. Along with fellow Orange County parent Jen Cousins, she founded the Florida Freedom to Read Project, which works with existing parent groups statewide on a range of educational issues, including efforts to “keep or get back books that have gone under challenge or have been banned.”
Over the past year, book challenges and bans have reached levels not seen in decades, according to officials at the American Library Association, the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) and other advocates for free expression. Censorship efforts have ranged from local communities such as Orange County and a Tennessee school board’s pulling Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel “Maus,” to statewide initiatives.
“There are some books with pornography and pedophilia that should absolutely be removed from K through 12 school libraries,” says Yael Levin, a spokeswoman for No Left Turn in Education, a national group opposed to what it calls a “Leftist agenda” for public schools that has called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate the availability of “Gender Queer” among other books. “Now we’re not talking about a public library or bookstores. We’re talking about K through 12 school libraries, books that are just pornographic and with pedophilic content.”