In Kutztown schools, the right’s culture warriors block a book on climate change

It’s a yearly tradition in Kutztown, the eastern Pennsylvania college town surrounded by more rural “Trump Country”: Middle schoolers across grades promote a love for literacy through a “One Book, One School” program by reading the same tome, discussing the work in their classes, and even meeting the author at a spring event at Kutztown University.

For 2023, teachers and administrators deemed Two Degrees by the popular young-adult author Alan Gratz as a perfect choice. Kids devour Gratz’s books, as evidenced by Two Degrees debuting as a New York Times’ No. 1 bestseller for young readers. Its subject matter — teens dramatically fighting catastrophes brought on by climate change — could not be more topical. Publishers Weekly hailed the book as a “gripping, timely tale [that] offers a meditative call to action about a global crisis.”

But for some Kutztown Area School Board members — elected in a post-pandemic conservative wave — and parents, the reviews for teens and adolescents reading a thriller about climate change were not nearly so positive.

According to the Reading Eagle, Republican school board member Jason Koch described Two Degrees as “a fear-driven book,” adding: ““Do we want our children to look at us in the way we live in this community and say it’s wrong?” Koch’s complaints were echoed by several parents — albeit a minority of those who spoke out — at a Kutztown Area board meeting last week. Said Daniel Wismer, father of two: “There are messages that are really directed to middle schoolers to feel guilty about a whole host of things. And that guilt is designed to spur them into action. One of those actions is with their parents.”

In Kutztown, the right-wing book bullies won ... again.

Indeed, the district superintendent, Christian Temchatin, had already called off the “One Book, One School” program before that board meeting, after some teachers told him they didn’t want to get dragged into a political controversy over a program intended to promote literacy. Call it a different kind of dangerous “climate change”: a political climate in which global warming is now joining racism and LGBTQ issues as under fire by culture warriors who don’t want young minds exposed to debate around such ideas.

Viewed in isolation, the Kutztown capitulation is a disturbing defeat for the idea that adolescents can develop a passion for reading and hone their critical-thinking skills around a topic that’s highly relevant to their young lives: the forward march of climate change that is already causing deadly wildfires and killer hurricanes like the ones described in Two Degrees.

But this didn’t happen in isolation. Indeed, the suburbs and exurbs around Philadelphia are becoming a front line in the fight over what’s appropriate for K-12 students in an era of bitter political division — with schools increasingly buckling under to complaints in a new kind of McCarthyism that’s bringing a chilling effect to the classroom.

In Washington Township in South Jersey, high school officials just yanked Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye from its honors freshman classes when one parent — who admitted not reading the book in its entirety — lodged a complaint about sexually explicit content. In the politically contentious Pennridge district in Bucks County, school administrators who curtailed requirements on social studies are now weighing the conservative “1776 Curriculum” that has been attacked by prominent historians.

It’s not surprising to see these battles in places like Kutztown, where Kutztown Borough — chock full of college professors and students — is a blue dot inside a sprawling district dominated by red, Trump-voting exurbs, which voted in new, more conservative board members like the GOP’s Koch in 2021. In January, a divided school board responded to some crusading parents by narrowly voting to keep the controversial book Gender Queer — although it now requires a parental permission slip — and some other tomes touching on LGBTQ topics in the school library.

Ironically, Kutztown is also home to a high school freshman, Joslyn Diffenbaugh, who last September won a national honor — the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation First Amendment Award — for launching the Kutztown Teen Banned Book Club that challenges members to read the books that have been targeted in the culture wars. Not surprisingly, Diffenbaugh went before the school board to criticize the forced retreat on Two Degrees as an assault on students’ rights, saying: “If we were to exclude students from realistic fiction including controversial topics without happy endings, it would hardly address student concerns, curiosities or prepare them for real life.”

» READ MORE: A school where even Banned Book Week was banned | Will Bunch Newsletter

A school board member, the Rev. Dennis Ritter, who is endorsed by Democrats and Republicans, told me Saturday in a phone interview that he read Two Degrees and thinks it offers a “positive message” despite the dark subject of climate disasters. “I think it’s been sadly mischaracterized,” said Ritter, who sees it not as “a fear-mongering book” but instead one that celebrates “agency by young people trying to make a difference in the world.”

“I’m flabbergasted,” Robyn Underwood, one of the Kutztown parents critical of the decision to kill the program, told me this weekend. Underwood said she’s part of a parent group that just read Two Degrees and “I see nothing in there that’s political at all.” She added: “I believe that climate change is real — the things that are happening in this book are happening in real life. There are wildfires in California. There are stronger hurricanes in Florida ...”

The school board’s Ritter also fears — correctly, I worry — that the conservative faction’s success in halting the program around Two Degrees “has given credence and ceded power to a group in this community that has been very vocal about change and I think is fearful of change.”

Indeed. The far-right’s assault on what young people learn is an immoral panic that has only accelerated since the spring of 2020, when so many teens — even in rural and conservative communities — voiced support for Black Lives Matter after the police murder of George Floyd. The fact that what began as an attack on antiracism education — given the scary misnomer “critical race theory” by conservatives — has metastasized into assaults on the LGBTQ community and is now going after climate science is no surprise. Kutztown parent Wismer essentially said the quiet part out loud: Conservatives are increasingly worried that a well-educated younger generation is rejecting their parents’ worldview.

But while the clampdown on this one book is disturbing, the most troubling aspect of what just happened in Kutztown is the reason Temchatin, the superintendent, gave parents for pulling the plug on Two Degrees — that the middle school teachers were feeling uncomfortable and concerned that politics would become a distraction.

This has been the real impact of the right-wing anti-book crusade — to create a chill over the classroom that terrifies teachers from discussing any subject that might be controversial. That’s especially worrisome when it comes to climate change, since boldness and not timidity is needed to stop the two-degree global temperature rise of the book’s title.

For now, school officials are shipping hundreds of copies of Two Degrees — the program is funded by a grant from a nonprofit group — back to the publisher, not to be read by the middle schoolers of Kutztown. The good news is about 50 copies that were opened by teachers or district officials are still around, and kids aren’t prevented from reading those on their own time, if they want. The bad news is that the reading list for the Kutztown Teens Banned Book Club has just expanded by one title.

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