The public comment portion of Monday's Hall County School Board meeting became an outlet for a number of parents to express their thoughts on the content of some books being provided in the county.
More than 50 people attended the meeting, with more than a dozen speaking on the issue. The discussion started on social media a week before when one parent, Angie Parsons, expressed concerns about what she considered to be inappropriate sexual content in a book that was part of an assignment given to her 9th grade son.
"He got in the car one day and he said 'mom, we've been given an assignment. We get to choose a book. There's four different books and you're not going to believe what's in these books,'" Parsons told the school board. "I was really schocked by the language and the sexual content in the books. I reached out to the teacher and she very kindly gave me an alternative."
Parsons said the book in question was the novel "Eleanor and Park".
"I would have liked a heads up as a parent because had my son not told me the name of the book, there was only one that required parental permission and it was not 'Eleanor & Park', my son could have said 'yeah, I want to read that' and I would have never known," Parsons said.
Hall County Schools Superintendent Will Schofield said he was aware of the issue in question and that we was pleased with how Monday's meeting went.
"Probably a couple of weeks ago is when we first heard that there was an issue," Schofield said. "I think it's a very positive thing what we saw here tonight and that is people asking questions and your board of education saying 'we're going to figure it out, we're going to continue to do it even better and we're not going to take knee-jerk reactions and take drastic measures. We're going to do things in a very deliberate and purposeful way.'"
Before the hearing, Schofield went over the county's guidelines for vetting reading materials and emphasized that he believes parents should have the final say in what materials their kids are reading.
"We have a school-level process in place that has been in place for 20 years. Any parent, any guardian can challenge any material at the school level and they can contact their child's teacher and ask for an alternative assignment. We see parents as the ultimate authority," Schofield told the audience. "Hall County sees banning of existing materials as an absolute last step."
Several parents at the meeting said they did not want to see any books banned from the county's school libraries.
"As a parent, I'm sorry, to not know what your children are reading, that's your fault," one woman said during the hearing. "You need to be aware of what books your kids are bringing home and what they're reading. I guarantee you what's in the halls and what's in public is way worse than what's in the books."
After the meeting, Schofield said the county needs to look closer at what materials are being given out as assignments.
"We really do need to distinguish between required assignments and just resources that are available and just make sure we're doing our due dilligence," Schofield said.
Parent Karla Lee told the school board she thinks the county needs to re-evaluate how it screens reading material.
"There are processes in place, but something happened. It fell through," Lee said. "Many things do not adhere to my values or my standards, that's not what I'm here to talk about today. I'm talking about adhering to yours. The things that were set out by people that I trust in this community that I have lived in my whole life."
