COBB COUNTY, Ga. — The Cobb County School District has removed four more books from its libraries over what Superintendent Chris Ragsdale called "lewd, vulgar, sexually explicit and graphic content inappropriate for a public school."
Cobb Schools first removed two books last year citing similar reasons. Those books were "Flamer" and "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl."
Ragsdale said at Thursday's Board of Education meeting (Ragsdale's comments on books begin at about the 1:31:00 mark) that since then, a third book was removed after a review process, and that four more are now being removed -- bringing the total to seven.
The superintendent said the third book removed was "Blankets," which he said the district reviewed after Fulton County removed it. The latest four books are “It Ends with Us,” “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” “Lucky,” and “Thirteen Reasons Why.”
"What we are doing is giving parents peace of mind in knowing their children will not have unrestricted access to this content while at school," Ragsdale said Thursday night. "...What we are doing is refusing to force Cobb County taxpayers and educators to facilitate and advance the sexualization of children."
Among the newly-removed books are some that are broadly popular with young people and been turned into TV series and films.
Critics of the book removals have cast them as "book bans" that stifle academic freedom and amount to censorship over certain ideas and concepts.
"I wish you would end your assault on media specialists and allow them to do their jobs," a parent, Sharon Hudson, said during Thursday night's public comment period (you can watch here a little after 58:00). "...Media specialists are the ones with the training to do their jobs, not you. Let them do their jobs, quit trying to ban books in their libraries."
After the announcement of the first two book removals last year, Jeff Hubbard with the Cobb County Association of Educators told 11Alive that media specialists and teachers were "scared" to run afoul of district and state content standards. A teacher, Katie Rinderle, was fired for reading "My Shadow is Purple" in her Cobb County fifth grade class under Georgia's "divisive concepts" education law passed in 2022. Her firing was later upheld by the state Board of Education.
“Our teachers are scared. Our media specialists are scared," Hubbard said last year. "They’re literally throwing away hundreds of dollars worth of books and supplemental materials from their classroom because if just one parent comes up with a complaint – they can be in danger of losing their jobs."
Ragsdale has remained steadfast that the removals are instead about protecting children from inappropriate materials as well as making sure teachers will not be "compelled to teach aspects of a child's education legally recognized as belonging to that child's family."
He called the process by which books have been selected for removal "very thorough" and rejected the framing of the removals as a "ban."
“I have made a distinct statement saying protecting children from age-inappropriate and graphically sexually explicit material is a battle between good and evil. You are either in favor of forcing public schools to provide lewd, vulgar, and sexually explicit materials to children, or you are against it,” Ragsdale said. “As I have repeatedly stated, ‘I do believe the attempt to sexualize children is evil, and we as educators have a professional and moral responsibility to prevent it.’ This is not only a professional but a moral obligation."
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