Alamance-Burlington Schools latest district to hear complaints about LGBTQ-themed books
Anthony and Mamie Brooks say they think they have a good chance of getting some books removed from libraries in the Alamance-Burlington School System in the next couple of months.
It is part of a larger effort to take LGBTQ-themed books out of schools all over the state, they said.
“There is a process of putting together the grievance letters,” said Mamie Brooks. “The next step is to submit it to the Superintendent and the principals so that they can do their review.”
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The school district had not confirmed the status of Brooks’ grievance process on Friday.
The list of books the Brooks object to has become familiar to anyone following the current controversies being brought to school boards around the state and country.
“What we’re seeing at school-board meetings and what’s being blown up is the latest era of the culture war, it has gone from anti-masking to anti (critical race theory), now we’re on anti-LGBTQ,” said Todd Warren with the advocacy group Down Home North Carolina and a former teacher.
“I think there’s been a whole lot of hot air of supposed solutions to a problem that simply does not exist.”
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The books on the Brooks’ list include Lawn Boy, an award-winning novel that has been compared to “Catcher in the Rye” and has profanity and sexually explicit scenes and a graphic novel called “Gender Queer.” What most have in common are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender themes.
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Mamie Brooks told the school board in June those books violated state law on disseminating obscenity, but like a lot of legal matters, that is open to interpretation.
“Under the law, school districts, school boards have some control over what books go into libraries and curriculums, but students also have a First Amendment right access to information,” said Dan Siegel, lawyer with ACLU of North Carolina. “So, if a school wants to remove books from a library or the curriculum, sometimes they can but it has to be for legitimate reasons.”
Supreme Court precedent does not allow books to be removed for partisan political reasons, hostility to groups represented in them or over objections to ideas expressed in them, Siegel said, even if they depict sex or sexuality.
“Simply because a book deals with mature themes, that doesn’t take away the book’s artistic or educational value,” Siegel said.
The Brooks say they represent a larger group called FACTS 2.0, a name taken from Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s FACTS Task Force (Fairness and Accountability in the Classroom for Teachers and Students), and got their list of books from the Pavement Education Project, a statewide group trying to remove sexually and LGBTQ-themed books from schools.
They haven’t read all of them.
“I’ve looked over some,” Mamie Brooks said.
This year, the Brooks have gone to the school board objecting to a variety of things including critical race theory and equity in education, all of which they call forms of Marxist indoctrination.
“We have no problem fighting multiple battles,” Mamie Brooks said.
Anthony Brooks said he took his daughter our of Graham High School two years ago over what he called indoctrination and has been taking similar reports from parents, teachers and students in the Triangle and Triad.
While she did not share the name of her legal advisor, Mamie Brooks said she believed they could use state law to remove books they objected to from schools.
The Brooks said they are encouraged by the response they’ve gotten from the Alamance-Burlington Board of Education and don’t think it will come to legal action. Board Chair Sandy Ellington-Graves said she simply passed information on to them about the district’s grievance policy and process.
That process starts at the school level with the principal and a committee, then the district superintendent and another committee before going on to the school board, according to the information Ellington-Graves shared.
This article originally appeared on Times-News: Alamance-Burlington Schools latest district to hear complaints about LGBTQ-themed books
