A Cobb County School District (CCSD) spokesperson told The Georgia Star News on Friday that a complaint from the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) to the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) repeats “made-up narratives espoused and circulated by a small community group which includes candidates for local office.”
NWLC’s complaint accused the school district of violating students’ civil rights by removing what school officials deemed inappropriate books from school libraries. The lawsuit was filed on Monday against CCSD for creating a “hostile environment” for students by allegedly “censoring” books written by or about LBGTQIA people and people of color (POC).
The spokesperson told The Star News, “Local political candidates, including those running for Board, repeating a made-up narrative doesn’t make it true and community groups who want to promote access to sexually explicit content for minors, doesn’t make it right.”
The spokesperson added that the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) “has not opened the complaint and often parents, staff, or in this case a political action group, use OCR as a means of lodging complaints.”
In its complaint, NWLC described the district’s actions as “driven by extremists as part of a coordinated plan to erase learning.”
“We’re fighting book bans in Georgia and Florida, because censorship has no place in schools,” the NWLC stated on X.
Also, NWLC stated in a press release on Monday that CCSD’s removal of books violates Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which “prohibits discrimination based on sex” and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which “prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin” in school programs receiving federal funding.
As previously reported, CCSD Superintendent Chris Ragsdale pushed back on the notion that the district was censoring when he announced plans in an April Board of Education meeting to remove four books from schools.
Ragsdale said, “What we are doing is not forcing taxpayers to fund students having unrestricted access to materials that are so sexually explicit and graphic they could not be read aloud in this very board meeting without violating FCC regulations.”
Specifically, the district removed It Ends with Us, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Lucky, and Thirteen Reasons Why, which had “lewd, vulgar, and sexually explicit and graphic content” that was inappropriate for school.
In August 2023, CCSD removed the books Flamer and Me Earl and the Dying Girl, which Ragsdale had described as “rife with graphic sexual content” that “involved children.”
NWLC’s complaint states that CCSD has removed inclusive books in its “wave of censorship.”
However, BookLooks, a website for parents that rates books on a scale of 1-5 for school-appropriate content, gave Flamer, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Thirteen Reasons Why each a rating of 3 and recommended guidance from parents or guardians for children under the age of 18.
BookLook’s 3 rating indicates that a book has “excessive or explicit violence,” “extreme or frequent hate,” “excessive or frequent profanity,” “references to sexual activity,” and “drug or alcohol abuse.”
It Ends with Us and The Perks of Being a Wallflower received a rating of 4 due to “explicit sexual nudity” and “obscene references to sexual activity.”
Lucky received a rating of 5 and is classified as being for adults only for its “explicit references to aberrant” or abnormal sexual activities.
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Debra McClure is a reporter at The Georgia Star News and The Star News Network. Follow Debra on X / Twitter.
