Radnor school board votes to restore ‘Gender Queer’ and two other banned books to library

The Radnor school board voted Tuesday to restore three books that were removed in February from Radnor High School’s library, after impassioned pleas from community members to reject censorship and support LGBTQ students.

The board voted 6-0, with three members abstaining, to return Gender Queer, Fun Home, and Blankets to the high school library. The vote reversed decisions by an ad hoc committee appointed by the district’s superintendent that determined the books — all graphic novels, with some sexual depictions — were not age appropriate.

“These books are memoirs about real struggles that our students have,” said Sarah Dunn, the Radnor board president.

Noting testimony from students who said the removal of the books — two of which feature LGBTQ themes — made them feel marginalized, Dunn asked fellow board members: “Are you going to tell kids, ‘You can’t have your books back’?”

The reversal came two months after the books were removed from the library — a decision precipitated by a parent who challenged the books as containing “child pornography.”

The district did not announce the challenges, or the committee it convened to review the books. Parents and students said they were surprised to learn in early March — some through news reporting — that the books had been pulled.

Since then, Radnor’s school board meetings have been dominated by public comments criticizing the bans — from accusations the district had bowed to a conservative movement against discussion of sexuality in schools, to personal stories from students and alumni.

“It took me four years to convince my wife to move to Radnor,” and to assure her “this was a welcoming place,” Katherine Barrett-Risk, a Radnor graduate, told the school board Tuesday. ”You can understand my embarrassment when just a few months in, I’m standing in front of a school board talking about banned books."

Not reinstating the books would put Radnor “on the wrong side of history,” Barrett-Risk said.

Craig Press told the board that “you can’t catch gay from a book.”

“Books really can’t hurt anyone. What can hurt people is people, and that’s what’s happening in our community,” Press said. As a pediatric neurologist who has cared for children who have shot other people or themselves, Press said, he believes it can be dangerous for children to not feel included in a community.

Critics of the books have accused proponents of downplaying sexually explicit images.

Radnor parent Michael Lake — who wrote an email to fellow parents in January saying he believed he had “finally convinced” Radnor’s superintendent and legal counsel “that certain books housed in Radnor High School’s library violate Commonwealth and federal law by containing child pornography” — told members of the board’s curriculum committee last week that images in the books were “shocking” and “gratuitous.”

“The right to read is not a right of minors to view pornography,” said Lake, who read from state and federal statutes. Behind him, a woman held up poster boards with blown-up images from the books.

On Tuesday, Carl Rosin, an English teacher at Radnor High School, told the school board that Lake had neglected to note the statutes describe exceptions for educational or literary merit.

“Why would such statutes even need to identify exceptions? Because content, intent, and art matter,” said Rosin, who has included Fun Home among optional book selections in one of his courses, and noted that it depicts “consenting 19-year-olds,” rather than children.

Dunn said the district’s counsel had “confirmed the images in these books do not constitute child pornography.”

While the board’s nine members agreed Tuesday that the books should be returned to the library, they disagreed over whether they should first amend the library policy that the district followed in removing them. The policy, which dates to 2008, has been criticized by community members for providing limited transparency around book challenges and not affirming the importance of academic freedom.

Some board members said it would be better to revise the policy first, then vote to restore the books.

“We’re setting up a precedent where we’re saying, ‘OK, we don’t like that, we’re just going to change it,’” said DJ Thornton, who also questioned whether the books could be immediately challenged again.

Dunn said the district would be required to form another ad hoc review committee, but given that the school board is reviewing the library policy, it would “not be unreasonable” for administrators to wait to address the challenge until a new policy was in place. (Thornton ultimately voted to restore the books; Liz Duffy, Clare Girton, and Lon Rosenblum abstained.)

Among those who voted to restore the books was Andrew Babson, who was the school board’s representative on the committee that voted 5-1 to remove the books. On Tuesday, Babson said he had “profoundly changed” his perspective after speaking with a friend who is transgender and had also been the victim of child abuse. Babson said his friend told him that reading Blankets, which describes sexual abuse by a babysitter, “would have helped her not to be ashamed.”

“I had a blind spot,” Babson said, adding that he also had not understood what librarians consider in selecting books for the collection. “I regret and am sorry for any unintentional harm I have caused any child in this community, or families.”