Re: Sec: Parental Request

[Marian Royal <marianroyal@HOTMAIL.COM>]

I would just like to second what Karen DeFrank and perhaps others have
pointed out about the difficulty of determining exactly which materials are
objectionable to the parent.  Although I don't have a problem with the idea
of monitoring what students check out from the school library, in reality
it's less easy than it appears.  For instance, I have a first grader who was
not allowed even to color pictures of animals from the Harry Potter books
when we had HP week here.  In fact, he wasn't allowed to come to library
that week, as I recall. Then, two weeks ago, he came in and asked if I had
The Lord of the Rings! I told him it wasn't appropriate for a K-3 library
and he wanted to know why not, because his parents had taken him to see the
movie!! A FIRST grader!!I told him that even if I had it, I wouldn't have
let him check it out because he was too young and I knew his mother was
opposed to books about magic.  He then told me that TLOTR was okay, because
the magic in that was used to fight evil.  Now, I would have said that about
HP, but in his mother's eyes, the two books are morally different.  Since I
don't share his mother's moral outlook, I would never be able to accurately
assess what was "okay" for him and what wasn't.  So I think if we're going
to honor parent's requests to restrict materials, the materials have to be
named by specific title, not by genre or any other broad category which
leaves room for interpretation.

Marian Royal
Parkview Elementary
Socorro, NM
marianroyal@hotmail.com

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