(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) Administrators in the Department of Education weighed in on a local-level school district dispute concerning sexually explicit books that the superintendent opted to remove from the school’s libraries.
According to the The Federalist, the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights sent a letter to Forsyth County Schools Superintendent Jeff Bearden with a litany of complaints in response to this decision.
The office ordered the Georgia school district to offer “supportive measures to students who may have been impacted by the book removal process.”
They also demanded the school district perform a “climate survey” of middle and high school students to determine the need for additional action. They did not specify what that action would be.
The federal office inserted itself into the issue after an anonymous complaint accused administrators and parents of open hostility towards gay students.
Representatives from the Biden administration interviewed staff throughout the district, attended school board meetings and reviewed district-level documentation and email records.
“In my opinion, this is not about books,” Cindy Martin, a mother in the district, said. “This is about the federal government using bully tactics against our school system to indoctrinate our children into their LGBTQ ideology.”
Bearden made the executive decision to remove explicit books in January of 2022, drawing the ire of the federal government.
In the end, the district removed nine books from all of their school libraries and restricted an additional six books to just the high schools.
“The content in them was what we would consider pervasively vulgar, and it’s not about whether or not a parent or guardian liked or disliked the ideas contained in the book or liked or disliked the author or the author’s identity, we focused on content that was pervasively vulgar,” said Jennifer Caracciolo, the school district’s spokesperson.
Biden’s Office of Civil Rights claimed they performed a pervasive investigation because “the District did not make an announcement to… the students about the removal of the books.”
The bureaucrats also insisted that the proponents of removing the books wanted “to exclude diverse authors and characters.”
“Many parents called for the removal of additional books, with most of their comments focused on sexually explicit content; however, some comments focused on removing books for reasons related to gender identity or sexual orientation,” the letter stated.
Despite coming under attack from the federal government, it failed to deter the parents of the district.
