Note: This article quotes explicit sexual content.
When Paula Allen first wanted pornography removed from her child’s school library, she didn’t realize that would be controversial. Everyone, she reasoned, agrees graphic descriptions of sexual intercourse and images of full-frontal nudity found in schools should be immediately removed.
The school board of Missouri’s Cameron R-I district, which serves 1,600 students in a suburb of Kansas City, disagreed. After two years of complaints from parents, this August the district put 36 of 80 challenged books behind the circulation desk, where publicly sponsored pornography continues to be available to minors so long as they have parent permission. Any explicit books that parents haven’t discovered yet, and future books selected by employees who have already used taxpayer funds to buy minors pornography, could still be on the shelves after the district denied parents library access.
“At my very first meeting [with] the superintendent… I all but begged him, ‘Let’s please work together in unity as a group, as parents, we have a concern. You have to address these concerns. Let’s work together,’” Allen explained. “[They] attempted to do essentially a character assassination, to discredit us and to make them, as in the school board and the school district administration, look like victims and make us look like villains. Because we’re standing up for our kids.”
A group of local parents has been battling to protect children in school libraries for more than two years. Allen and Heath Gilbert spoke with The Federalist about their
