Carroll County Public School students take a stand against potential book bans
BALTIMORE - Students are weighing in on potential book bans in Carroll County Schools.
"Everyone deserves to have a voice and at the end of the day, we are the ones that get affected by this policy," Carroll County NAACP Youth Council President Flematu Fofana said.
WJZ spoke with four members of the Carroll County NAACP Youth Council, who are also students in Carroll County Schools.
Earlier this month, a list of more than 50 books was flagged by concerned parents, many of them with a group called, "Moms for Liberty."
The group and dozens of other parents spoke out at the Board of Education's meeting last week.
The Youth Council members tell WJZ they first learned books were being reviewed by the school district reconsideration committee from news articles and that many of their fellow students don't know any of this is going on.
"There was definitely a lot of shock and surprise from the student body," Fofana said. "We also saw there was a lot of people wanting to do something but they didn't know exactly what it was that they could do."
Some of the Youth Council members spoke at last week's board meeting, fighting to keep every book under scrutiny in school libraries.
They said many of their classmates are also against the book bans.
"They very much believe that these books are important to the school environment and that these books ensure that you can learn about and experience things that you never would've otherwise," Carroll County NAACP Youth Council member Grace Crovo said.
They're now calling on other students to come to the board of education's next meeting on Oct. 11 to speak.
"The biggest thing here is that we need student participation," Crovo said. "We need more students helping and speaking at the board meetings, even writing comments on the board's website."
The review process for five of the books under consideration has been completed.
The committee decided of all them can stay in high school libraries, but one of them, a novel called "Slaughterhouse Five" will be removed from middle school libraries.
Fifty-one books are still up for review.
You can read the full list of books below:
Book List Final (1) (1) by Adam Thompson on Scribd
