Carroll County Public School District's reconsideration committee makes decisions on 5 books
BALTIMORE -- The Carroll County Public School District's reconsideration committee is currently re-evaluating the appropriateness of nearly five dozen books in school libraries after a group of community members expressed concerns about their content.
WJZ obtained copies of the reconsideration committee's decision letters for the first five of 56 books up for review in Carroll County Public Schools.
These are the books that were under consideration:
- Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture
- Slaughterhouse Five
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower
- The Sun and Her Flowers
- Tilt
The committee decided all of them will stay in high school libraries, but Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, however, will no longer be available in middle school libraries. The committee deemed it too complex for middle school students.
"I think what kids have available to them needs some sort of guidance," Bel Air resident Christine Kim said. "Obviously, movies have ratings like PG, G, R…so I can kind of see why they're doing the review."
With 51 books still on the chopping block, the issue of removing books from school libraries has sparked an important conversation even beyond the boundaries of Carroll County.
Kim said she thinks there should be a level of discernment when it comes to what is age-appropriate.
Student Andrew Bigelow noted that Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 was also banned at one point and re-released in a sanitized form in the 1970s.
"In a democracy that's supposed to be as free as America, they really shouldn't ban anything," he said.
The reconsideration committee will continue to review five books at a time. The group, Moms of Liberty, which compiled and submitted the list, said the books were selected based on their sexually explicit content and graphic material.