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Parents Act on Schools’ Offensive Reading Material 3/8/2006 Group provides Web site, resources about what to do.
In the spring of 2004, a group of parents in Overland Park, Kansas, sat down with some of their children’s assigned reading from school. What they found appalled them—and motivated them to do something about it.
Janet Harmon, one of the parents, told Concerned Women for America (CWA) her reaction to her son reading one of the books: “This is a 14-year-old freshman boy, and [the book] had references to oral sex and homosexuality. … I thought it was a mistake!”
When these parents spread the word about the books’ contents to others, they were met with disbelief.
To address the school’s failure to provide appropriate reading material, Janet joined Lisa Friedrichsen and Sherry Millen to create Classkc.org (Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools), a Web site to inform parents about the contents of their children’s reading material and about how to get involved to make changes.
“As parents and taxpayers, we find these influences on our children absolutely unacceptable when hundreds and perhaps thousands of other award-winning and classic literature choices that meet course objectives could be made,” the Web site reads. Examples given include Dickens’ David Copperfield and Melville’s Moby Dick.
While a portion of the Web site provides information for local parents about the Blue Valley Board of Education in Overland Park, Kansas, it still offers much for out-of-town parents. One link leads to a list of commonly assigned reading for high school students that contain profanity and sexually explicit material. Next to each book is the “Lexile grade level,” or the measurement of the book’s reader ability and text difficulty.
Books assigned to 11th and 12th grade Blue Valley students, such as Song of Solomon and Beloved, are given 5th and 6th grade levels of difficulty by the Lexile system. The books, therefore, are not only vulgar but provide little intellectual challenge for high school students. Other links on the site include parent-written reviews of books on school reading lists.
One of Classkc.org’s fundamental principles is that parents should have final say regarding the formation of their children’s values, not the state: “The state should not have open season on when, where and how to indoctrinate and form children’s sexual attitudes, but rather, … the parents should have the primary role in values education and overall worldview, particularly in the area of sexual values, for their own children.”
One area where the state should have more impact, Jane Harmon asserts, is in its application of obscenity laws. Each state, she points out, has obscenity laws that public schools are not obligated to follow. “That’s something that needs to change,” Harmon said. “We feel it should become a nationwide law that public schools should follow state obscenity laws.”
“In the battle to protect our children from harm, there has to be an effort on two fronts. Parents must be involved and aware of the material to which their children are exposed, and the community itself needs to respond in keeping community standards high so that obscenity is viewed by all in the same way,” said Judy Smith, State Director for CWA of Kansas. “I applaud the efforts of these parents and stakeholders to protect children from vulgarity, violence and inappropriate themes in school reading lists. They have gone about this in a reasonable way, using the process available, and they have exercised the ultimate in local control.”
For more information, click here and here.
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