Voters in Plattsmouth, Nebraska this week decided to recall one of their school board members after she tried to remove books from school libraries.
In a mail-in election on Tuesday, more than 1,600 Plattsmouth voters supported recalling Terri Cunningham-Swanson, while 1,000 residents voted against, the Omaha World-Herald reported.
Ms. Cunningham-Swanson led an effort to have about 50 books removed from school libraries due to concerns about pornographic and/or inappropriate content. The book removal policy began after the board revised Article 6 Policy 6300, which establishes the school district’s criteria for media materials.
Students held a protest and one librarian resigned after the books were pulled from library shelves pending review.
“People’s sensitivity is subjective and that it should be between parents and students rather than taking it away in total,” Plattsmouth High School junior Ciara Basch previously told Omaha’s KETV news.
Addressing a May 8 school board meeting, Linda Vermooten questioned the long-term effects of such books on children. “Are you aware that if I took these books and handed them to students outside the school, I would be arrested for distributing pornography?”
KETV obtained a full list of the books in question, which were reviewed for themes including LGBTQ ideology, sex, rape, abuse, race, drug and alcohol use and addiction, foster care, religion, self-harm, and profanity.
Eventually, only one book—“Triangles” by Ellen Hopkins—was pulled from the shelves.
Eleven other books were put in a restricted section that students need parent permission to check books out from. More than 30 other books were kept on general library shelves.
When the book review was discussed at a fall meeting, other board members pointed out that the books that were challenged were rarely checked out in the Plattsmouth district, which is about 20 miles south of Omaha.
A judge recently blocked key parts of an Iowa law that bans books depicting sex acts from public school libraries and classrooms.
George Washington University student and political advocate Jayden Speed, who led the recall campaign, dubbed Ms. Cunningham-Swanson’s efforts “extremism” and said the results of the recall were exciting.
Meanwhile, Ms. Cunningham-Swanson said that voters should not have been surprised by her effort because she had expressed her concerns before she was voted into office. The slogan on her website opposing the recall urged residents to vote “no to obscenity in our schools, no to sexualizing students, no to woke ideologues, no to political bullies and no to the recall.”
“People that voted for me should have been very well informed on who I was and what I was going to do,” she said in a video posted to her website.
When Ms. Cunningham-Swanson ran for a place on the board in 2022, book removal was part of her platform. She included the following statement on education and curriculum on her campaign website:
“As student performance continues to plummet in America, academics have been put on a back burner to social programming. Our schools need to return to their original intent, to educate our children. We need Reading, Writing, STEM, Civics, American and World History to be the curriculum of our schools. And the text books for these subjects need to be free of CRT, CSE, SEL, and other forms of indoctrination. The time has come to return to basic academic standards that once kept American students at the top of the world’s academic performers.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
From The Epoch Times
