COLUMBIA — Four more books should be removed from South Carolina public schools for including graphic descriptions of masturbation and sex, a State Board of Education panel decided Thursday.
The five-person committee voted to keep two books — “Bronx Masquerade” and “The House on Mango Street” — on shelves and in the classrooms where teachers use them for assignments. Those two were held over from a prior meeting.
The four books the committee voted to remove aren’t used in classroom lessons, though they are available in some school libraries. They will join seven others barred from school library shelves since a state regulation forbid public schools from using or allowing students access to books containing “sexual conduct.”
Since October, the board has decided three books and a textbook can remain. It made one novel, “Crank” by Ellen Hopkins, available only to high school students with parental permission.
The full, 15-member Board of Education will take up the recommendations at its Feb. 4 meeting. If a majority agrees, the books would have to be removed.
The four books newly reviewed Thursday came from a challenge by parent Ivie Szalai, who says her children attend Beaufort County public schools. According to her appeal form, she again asked the school district to consider removing the books after the regulation took effect.
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A district committee had already reviewed the books between 2022 and 2023 as part of a list of 97 titles, almost all of which Szalai brought before the school board. The committee voted to remove five of the books, leaving the four Szalai challenged Thursday available to high school students, according to the district website.
The district board had 90 days to take up her appeal before it went to the state education board, based on deadlines set in the regulation.
This is the first time a book has gone through the appeals process laid out in the regulation. The first 11 titles were curated by agency staff, and the next three bypassed the process because they were being taught in classrooms instead of just available in the library.
Three of the books reviewed Thursday were among the 10 most commonly challenged titles nationally in 2023, according to the American Library Association. The memoir “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson, epistolary novel “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky, and graphic novel “Flamer” by Mike Curato are coming-of-age stories about teenagers learning t accept themselves despite challenges caused by their race, sexual orientation or past trauma.
The fourth novel, “PUSH” by Sapphire, is about an illiterate 16-year-old girl’s journey learning how to heal after being raped by her father and abused by her mother, according to the author’s website.
All four include descriptions of masturbation and sex that are inappropriate for children and clearly violate the state regulation, Szalai said.
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Supporters of keeping the books on the shelves argued that children need access to stories about situations they might experience, including sexual abuse, domestic violence and bullying.
Stories about those issues from the perspective of LGBTQ characters and characters of color, as the four novels considered Thursday are written, are especially important for children who might be struggling with their own identity, said Mark Bayer, a Pawleys Island nurse who leads a group for LGBTQ youth.
“In my work with queer youth, I’ve seen how representation can change lives,” Bayer told the committee in requesting it keep “Flamer” on shelves. “It can mean the difference between despair and hope, between life and death.”
But the books clearly violate the state regulation, Szalai said. Removing them from schools doesn’t cut children off from them completely, since children can still check out the books from their county public libraries or buy them at a bookstore, she said.
“I want to see every person, race, color, sexual persuasion represented in books,” Szalai said. “All of our children deserve that, but I hope that our highly educated librarians and educators will now see to possibly looking for books that provide that without the sexual conduct.”
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“Bronx Masquerade” and “The House on Mango Street” did not cross the line into sexual conduct, committee members decided. The two books came before the committee again after the Fort Mill parent challenging them failed to provide enough information for board members to make a decision in November.
“Bronx Masquerade,” which is structured through a series of poems designed to be read aloud, had no objectionable passages, department staff said. And while “The House on Mango Street” includes a scene in which the main character experiences sexual assault, the attack is not described in detail, keeping it appropriate for students, board members said.
During previous reviews, board members decided that a sexual encounter that happens off the page does not violate the regulation. For a book to be removed from shelves, it must describe “sexual conduct” in a graphic enough way that a reader who didn’t know about sex would be able to envision it, the board has previously decided.
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