Update: Beaufort school board restricts Handmaid's Tale and 4 other books
This morning I shared that Beaufort Schools was considering five books due to a parent complaint from Ivey Szalai, who previously challenged 96 books in the district.
During the meeting, board members discussed their options, clarifying that they could ban books outright, retain them in libraries— while allowing parents to opt students out of some or all library books— or restrict them to use only by high school students who first obtained written parent consent for each specific book. The board ultimately chose to age-restrict all five books, which include the following:
Milk and Honey, by Rupi Kapur
Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood
November 9, by Colleen Hoover
Perfect, by Ellen Hopkins
The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
This is despite that fact that the State Board of Education seemingly established a different precedent when it chose to retain 1984 without age-restricting it, despite the sexual content in that book.
(Above, Mary Foster of Families Against Book Bans defends The Handmaid’s Tale.)
This seemingly leaves Beaufort up to the same criticism (and potential legal actions) as the State Board has received for seeming to have a double-standard when it comes to “depictions of sexual content”.
Mary Foster of Families Against Book Bans (see video above) argued that the board’s job was to consider whether each book violated the state regulation, and reminded them that the State Board has voted to fully retain books which contained some sexual content, including 1984.
