More than 60 books have been challenged or are under review in Central Bucks, district employees say

More than 60 books have been challenged or are under review in the Central Bucks School District, according to district employees, spurring fears of censorship and questions about how the district will handle the volume of complaints.

Advocates for Inclusive Education, a group that has accused the district of wanting to chill classroom speech and bowing to conservative parents, posted a list of 60 books it said have been challenged now that the district has outlined rules governing its policy prohibiting “sexualized content.”

The list matched one provided to The Inquirer by a district employee. A second employee told The Inquirer they were aware of 59 challenges as of Tuesday.

The challenges — which the district declined to comment on Wednesday — are in addition to five books the district is already reviewing for possible removal at the request of administrators.

Book challenges have surged nationally as conservatives have claimed schools are “indoctrinating” students around gender and sexuality. Amid that debate, Central Bucks passed a policy prohibiting “sexualized content” that library experts deemed one of the most restrictive policies in Pennsylvania.

But the district didn’t announce it had put regulations into place to carry out the policy until last month — enacted with the help of the Independence Law Center, a Harrisburg group that bills itself as defending religious freedom and that has opposed rights for transgender students.

At the time, the district said it hadn’t received any book challenges, though Superintendent Abram Lucabaugh said it had already decided to review five books — This Book Is Gay; Me and Earl and the Dying Girl; Gender Queer; Lawn Boy; and Beyond Magenta — due to its responsibility “to guard against the sexualization of children.”

Four of those five books center on LGBTQ characters, a theme of recent book-banning activity in schools nationally. The most recent challenges include similar-themed books, while others span an array of topics — from school shootings to sex.

“Instead of trusting its professionally trained library staff and teachers, the Central Bucks School District has adopted a policy that allows anyone to submit a book challenge,” said Rich Ting, a lawyer with the ACLU of Pennsylvania, “It’s unsurprising that the district is now being bombarded with book challenges that have the potential to decimate its library collection and ultimately harm students’ ability to learn.”

Ting said the ACLU — which filed a federal complaint last year alleging the district had created a hostile environment for LGBTQ students — would “have to wait and see how the [library] policy is applied to determine if there are potential legal violations.”

The district’s regulations say that if a book is challenged, a committee appointed by the superintendent will review it and prepare a report within 60 days, with the possibility of a 30-day extension if more time is required.

“How much is this going to cost?” said Katherine Semisch, a former Central Bucks English teacher and cofounder of the Advocates for Inclusive Education group. “How many hours are they going to pay how many employees to read how many books?”

Semisch said “multiple” employees provided the information on challenged books to her group. “People reached out to us, just in alarm,” she said.

She said that one book on the challenged list — Sold, by Patricia McCormick, about a young girl forced into sexual slavery in India — “is so tender and gentle and non-graphic. ... I would like to ask the people who challenged that book: Do you think kids should not know that this happens? Because you will never find a more sensitive depiction of it.”

In addition to modern books, others being challenged include Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye from 1970 — a frequently banned book — and other, classic young-adult books like Forever, by Judy Blume, and Go Ask Alice, by Beatrice Sparks.

Semisch’s group noted that numerous challenged titles appear on a website with ties to the Moms for Liberty group, which has chapters across the country and has been active in Central Bucks. The site, BookLooks, lists objectionable passages in books and assigns a rating.

One such review that Advocates for Inclusive Education said reveals the “true intent” behind the book challenges: BookLooks’ summary of This Is Our Rainbow, by Katherine Locke and Nicole Melleby, says it “contains alternate sexualities; inexplicit sexual activities; inexplicit sexual nudity; mild profanity; alternate gender ideologies; and controversial social and racial commentary,” according to the website.

A study released last year by the nonprofit PEN America — which put Pennsylvania behind only Texas and Florida in book-banning activity — found that of more than 1,600 books banned nationally between July 2021 and June 2022, 41% had LGBTQ+ themes, protagonists, or prominent or secondary characters, while 40% had protagonists or secondary characters of color.

Central Bucks — which recently passed a policy prohibiting teachers from advocating to students about “partisan, political or social policy issues” — has said it is not seeking to remove LGBTQ+ books.

It has also said that books will remain in school libraries during challenges and that if a book is determined to be age-inappropriate, it will be “replaced with another title of the same genre or with a similar educational purpose.”