But now, the school board in this suburb of Phoenix has voted to excise or redact two pages deep inside the book — 544 and 545 — because they discuss sexually transmitted diseases and contraception, including mifepristone, a drug that can be used to prevent or halt a pregnancy.
A law passed two years ago in Arizona requires schools to teach “preference, encouragement and support to childbirth and adoption” over abortion, and the school board decided that those pages were in violation of this law — even though the Arizona Education Department, which examined the book for compliance, found that they were not.
The controversy has turned into a referendum on the 2012 law, with supporters saying the textbook content cannot be removed fast enough and opponents crying foul for any number of reasons: technical, ethical, pedagogical. But the Gilbert school board is moving forward, trying to figure out how to remove the material in question — by way of black markers or scissors, if need be — despite resistance from parents, residents, the American Civil Liberties Union and even the district’s superintendent.
“It comes down to, it’s the law, and we need to be in compliance with the law,” said Julie Smith, a member of the Gilbert Public Schools governing board and also a parent who raised concerns about the book. “If people don’t like the law, they need to take it up with their state legislator. I don’t write the law. It’s my job to uphold it.”
Other people say that the school board has misinterpreted the law and that censoring the book amounts to a violation of students’ First Amendment rights — and may violate copyright law as well.
“The answer isn’t to redact pages from a science textbook,” said Alessandra Soler, executive director of the A.C.L.U. of Arizona. “It’s an extreme interpretation, an incorrect interpretation, and I think it sends the wrong message. More information is always going to be better.”
It was at a heated meeting last month that the school board voted, 3 to 2, that the two pages from “Campbell Biology: Concepts and Connections” had to be removed somehow. The district is also reviewing three other biology books and two anatomy books. In all, just over 3,000 students in Gilbert’s public high schools have science books with material that could be deemed objectionable, according to district officials.
The dispute has metastasized into fiery exchanges at board meetings, rumors about secret redacting sessions, and angry confrontations in local grocery stores. One school board member, an opponent of censoring the book, was so unnerved by the swirl of gossip about her that she felt compelled to post on Facebook that she had not been endorsed by Planned Parenthood.
Christina M. Kishimoto, the schools superintendent in Gilbert, who started in the job just this summer, has found herself caught in the crossfire. “I’m constantly getting emails about so-and-so threatening this or that,” she said. “The accusations are going back and forth. It’s a distraction. It’s upsetting families.”
Ms. Smith, the school board member and parent, said she had been driving her family home from church back in January when her son told her about what was in the textbook. “I almost drove off the road,” she said.
“I’m Catholic; we do not contracept,” Ms. Smith said. “It is a grave sin.” By including those pages in the curriculum, she added, “you have violated my religious rights.”
She and other parents offended by the material said they thought it could be in violation of a law signed in 2012, called SB 1009, which required Arizona schools to teach in a way that favored a woman’s taking a pregnancy to term over terminating it.
The textbook “speaks about abortion, it touches on childbirth, but there’s not a mention of adoption,” said Christine Accurso, a mother of three who moved her children out of the school district well before the issue arose but got involved nevertheless. “It was blatant. It was obvious.”
Ms. Accurso reached out to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal advocacy group that has been active in conservative causes. The organization, based in Scottsdale, has been particularly busy in Arizona: It championed a bill, passed by the State Legislature but vetoed by Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, that would have allowed business owners to cite religious beliefs as a reason to deny service to same-sex couples. More recently, the group has challenged the school district in Tempe, also on the grounds of violating SB 1009, for taking material from Planned Parenthood in developing a new sex-education curriculum.
In August, after lawyers for the Alliance Defending Freedom sent a letter to Gilbert school officials, the officials asked the Arizona Education Department for guidance. The department’s lawyers and officials reviewed the pages in question and found that they did not violate the law, as long as teachers filled in the lesson with the necessary context.
“Just simply stating a fact, a particular drug and its function, doesn’t mean you favor that particular course of action,” said Chris Kotterman, the department’s deputy director of policy development and government relations. “That’s not how textbooks work. That’s not how any other academic exercise works. You provide the context for whatever you’re talking about over the course of a unit of instruction.”
The law’s sponsor, State Senator Nancy Barto, Republican of Phoenix, disagreed: To her, there is no doubt this textbook breaks the rules.
“Sex education by any other name is sex education, and all the rules apply,” she said. She argued that even a straightforward description of how drugs like mifepristone work could not be “value neutral” because it failed to promote adoption and childbirth, as the law prescribes. “The only solution,” she said, “is the removal of the material, either by redaction or changing the book.”
After the district’s governing board agreed, Ms. Kishimoto, the superintendent, reiterated her concerns, which include possible copyright infringement and the alienation of teachers, who took the board’s move as a vote of no-confidence. (Pearson, the book’s publisher, declined through a spokesman to comment for this article; the book’s authors, when reached for comment, deferred to the company.)
Parents also said they worried that the redactions might put students in an Advanced Placement course at a disadvantage when they take a national exam on the material.
“Present all the facts and let the students apply their critical thinking and moral values to that information, instead of censoring those facts,” Tammy Brady, a parent whose children have used the textbook, said at a recent school board meeting. “You are suggesting to redact and limit our children’s possibilities.”
There is a chance the board could reverse its decision before the end of the school year: An election this month changed its composition, and a more moderate majority will take control in January. And Ms. Kishimoto, who said she had to carry out the directive whether she agreed with it or not, aims to postpone redacting the textbooks until the summer, limiting the disruption to students.
Jill Humpherys, a member of the board opposed to redacting, said there was no better way to call attention to the material than to try to remove it. “If you hand a high school student a book with words marked out or a sticker over parts of it, that’s going to be the most-read page in the textbook,” said Ms. Humpherys, a mother of five. “I’ve raised enough children to know that.”
Source:http://www.nytimes.com/