Re: Your Sweeping Book Ban Proposal

An email to the South Carolina Board of Education.

Today, I attended the regular meeting of the South Carolina Board of Education. This meeting, lack the one last month, was unusually well-attended. The regular board meetings are at 1:00 on a Tuesday in Columbia, and are usually not well-attended. Today, due to what seemed like a well-intentioned snafu, a staff member told prospective commenters to sign what turned out to be the wrong sheet. After some audible confusion, outgoing board chair Stapleton proposed a compromise and allowed the first six of about ten folks who had signed up to speak to share their comments. The remarks below are what I was going to say; instead, I ended up sharing with the board members via their email addresses, available on the public website.

Fortunately, we got to hear some excellent testimony from a former student of Beaufort public schools and SCASL’s Tamara Cox. (We also got to hear from a guy who briefly rose to make a transphobic comment, and a woman who made a highly esoteric argument involving Ma…