After two hours of public comment, the Nixa school board voted Thursday night to ban two books from high school shelves and restrict another.
At its regular meeting, the board was tasked with deciding the fate of three of the sixteen books that had been questioned by parents. Of those, the queer memoirs “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” and “All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto” were banned.
A third book, “Homegoing,” was restricted, meaning it will be issued to a student with parental permission, but will not be placed on high school shelves.
“Fun Home” is Alison Bechdel’s award-winning graphic memoir, telling the story of her childhood as a lesbian and strained relationship with her closeted, gay father.
Mother Carissa Corson requested that the book be removed for its graphic sexual content.
“Completely inappropriate for minors! Their online catalog even says ‘includes mature content.’ This book contains pornography.”
According to Corson, the alleged pornography includes full frontal male genitalia, scenes of oral sex, pedophilia, grooming, and topless women.
Corson also filed a lawsuit against “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” which is George M. Johnson’s memoir that tells the story of his childhood as a black, queer boy.
According to Corson, the book contains “graphic” oral and anal sex and “all copies should be removed”.
“Homegoing” portrays a series of vignettes of many generations of a family who were brought to the United States in the Atlantic slave trade.
Of the 16 books, seven have been restricted, including “Homegoing”, two have been banned, and seven have yet to be awarded.
Before casting their vote, school board members stressed the importance of courtesy and listening to the debate from both sides; several commented on the difficulty of their decision.
There were two hours of testimonials from parents, community members and students. The night often turned into boos, cheers, and standing ovations.
Sitting in the front rows were more than a dozen high school students from Nixa who came to speak out against the bans.
“Students are more mature than anything else and most have the ability to handle complex topics or topics presented in these books. Slavery, racism, and other topics are examples of mature topics that students learn in elementary and high school.” When students get to high school, they can navigate these issues on their own without the guidance of a teacher or parent,” said Nixa Junior Justice Jones.
Jones added that parents currently have the right to prevent their children from checking out questionable books from the school library.
“Although these books may not be appropriate for all students, it is unfair to limit options for every student. Whether or not a student should read a particular book is solely between them and their parents,” Jones said.
The students collected 316 signatures from their classmates asking that the books remain in the library.
“These firms represent students of all grades, genders and ethnicities, who believe they will benefit from unrestricted access to these books in the library,” Jones said.
Many of the parents at the meeting called for all the books to be removed from the shelves, calling them pornographic.
“Excerpts from these books are so egregious and explicit that reading them aloud in front of minors would defeat the purpose of our mission,” Corson said.
Along with many other speakers at the meeting, Corson called for Nixa High School’s librarian to resign for allowing these books into the school.
“If (the school board) voted to keep these books on the shelf, you belong on a national record. I would like to ask for the resignation of the librarian at Nixa High School,” Corson said to applause and jeers from the respective sides. .
“They have abused their authority to expose our children to pornographic books and instead of apologizing, they double down and put their stamp of approval on it. They too belong on a national registry.”
Later in the meeting, the Nixa high school students in attendance announced their support for their librarian and said they would stand in solidarity with them if they were fired.
When another speaker called for the librarian’s resignation, a student booed loudly and interrupted the speaker. Before the board could bring the meeting back to order, another person yelled at the booing student, “Oh, shut up!”