Kansas Parents Want Books Removed from Curriculum
by Jim Brown
November 28, 2005
(AgapePress) - - Concerned parents in one Kansas school district are seeking to get 14 books removed from high school reading lists because they contain obscenities, vulgar language, or sexually explicit material. The effort is being led by parents with the group Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools, which believes students in Blue Valley schools are being required to read some novels that are pornographic in nature. However, the Blue Valley Board of Education is refusing to remove the controversial books from the district's high school curriculum.
Greg Motley, a spokesman for the parents group, says the board has a troubling moral worldview -- "and they're extremely sure that our worldview is not correct," he adds.
Still, he encourages parents to take action on behalf of their children. "I think what it's going to take for [the board] to get the message that they need to listen to parents, is for more parents [to make] a stand," says Motley. "It's going to take more parents opting their kids out of the classes that are requiring these books to be read."
But according to the group spokesman, money may be the reason that some parents are hesitating to do anything. He says the economic climate in the community is such that some business-owning parents are taking a financial hit for publicly taking a stand against the books.
"It's a very difficult line to draw in the sand to say I'm going to make my kid walk out of this classroom," he says, "[because] I'm going to cause my kid to be ostracized by the group of peers that he values -- and secondly, that my business might suffer because of the adverse publicity that I receive."
Steve Abrams, chairman of the Kansas State Board of Education, recently stated that "superintendents and local boards of education in some districts continue to promulgate pornography as 'literature,' even though many parents have petitioned the local boards to remove the porn." Motley says his group currently has 800 people on a petition saying the 14 books should be not read by any students in the Blue Valley School District.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
