A concerned mother asked the Goffstown School Board Monday, Sept. 20, to remove a book from the Mountain View Middle School curriculum because of its violent subject matter.
Tracy LaSalle of Goffstown said her 11-year-old daughter began having nightmares after reading “Hunger Games,” a novel by Suzanne Collins, in her seventh-grade class.The first novel of a trilogy, “Hunger Games” is a story about a post-apocalyptic future in which 24 teenagers are forced to compete in a televised battle to the death.
During that battle, the book’s heroine, Katniss Everdeen, must “start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love,” according to the publisher’s description of the novel.
LaSalle told the School Board that the book was wholly inappropriate for her daughter or any other student.
“Twenty-four children are pitted in a life-or-death struggle with each other. The reason? Entertainment. That’s sick,” LaSalle said. “You guys don’t want Columbine, but you’re putting forth material that will totally desensitize the children to murdering other children.”
During the Sept. 20 School Board meeting, LaSalle described several graphic passages in the book where the teenage competitors kill each other.
“What does that teach as far as honor?” LaSalle asked. “What does that teach as far as ethics? Where is the moral lesson in this book that’s being shown to our children?”
After hearing LaSalle’s complaint, School Board Chairman Keith Allard asked Superintendent of Schools Stacey Buckley to review the book. Buckley said the book will be reviewed by a committee at the school, which will issue its findings to LaSalle and Buckley within 30 days.
“It goes to the materials review committee, which consists of the librarians, the principal of the building and teaching staff,” Buckley said in an interview. “They’ll review the material and the curriculum and determine whether it’s appropriate.”
Allard said LaSalle’s complaint was rare for the school district, where parents typically resolve their concerns with teachers or school administrators.
“There may have been some more informal conversations with parents or something like that, but this is the first one – at least in the last eight years – that it’s come to the board level,” Allard said.
LaSalle said administrators at Mountain View Middle School acted quickly to remove her daughter from the class where “Hunger Games” was being taught. But LaSalle said she felt the problem was with the book, and not her daughter.
“The answer to this situation is not removing my daughter from the classroom,” LaSalle said. “It’s removing this filth from the school district."
[Source Goffstown News]
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Oh, seriously? How about you act like a parent and teach the child and work with the school instead of screaming that your Pweshus Widdle Snowfwake got exposed to something that shocked her white middle-class sensibilities?
ReplyDeleteAgreed, kids are too sheltered these days.
ReplyDeleteIt's the parents job to monitor what their child reads, not the school. If libraries removed every book someone found offensive we wouldn't have any books!
ReplyDelete