After another city approved a sexual book in the face of parental objections, traditional Indiana legislators want to pass a bill to ban sexually explicit content in classrooms.
In September, the board for the Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation (BCSC ) in Columbus, Indiana ( located between Indianapolis and Louisville ), voted to approve a book titled Push by Sapphire, despite protests from parents concerned about graphic text. At the conference where a law prohibits families from keeping the book out of the children’s arms, one committee member read passages from the text.
He said,” I almost want to put up right then because I’m trying to go through this.”
However, the school board approved another activity to keep the title on the library shelves and denied one that required parental consent for children to access the guide.
The Board’s decision is summarized in a report from the conference that states that” after reviewing this problem, the Board concludes that Push by Sapphire is no “obscene” or “harmful to adolescents” as the terms are defined in Indiana Code. The analysis committee’s determination was upheld, and the text may still be on the bookshelf of the Columbus East High School Media Center.
Micah Clark, the mind of the Indiana American Family Association, told The Federalist that kids are regularly” shocked” by the visual material distributed to students in universities.
” If a parent can’t control what a child reads”, Clark said,” that is a dereliction of duty on the school board’s part”.
A new costs introduced last month in the Indiana government would have forbid the school board from exercising its authority over the decision-making process. A group of lawmakers proposed House Bill 1195 in January, which mandates that schools put a cap on the amount of offensive material students can watch online. The act, however, has yet to be scheduled for a reading by the House Education Committee chaired by GOP Rep. Robert Behning. Clark told The Federalist, however, the committee president “doesn’t seem to want to learn the bill”.
He “usually deals with issues with knowledge that the government or the education system wants,” Clark said. ” He doesn’t seem to like these kinds of cultural dilemmas”.
On Friday, Behning did not respond to numerous questions from The Federalist.
The board of the Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation (BCSC), according to Cindi Hajicek, the senior director of the Indiana children’s advocacy group Purple for Kids United, was now violating the law already in place.
” If we followed the letter of the law, we don’t need any other laws”, she said, pointing to a piece of legislation passed in 2023 banning schools from “mak]ing ] available” “obscene matter”. However, she explained that school boards have made a practice of evading the rules by denying the existence of unpleasant material.
She said,” They just simply put out a declaration that it does not satisfy the legal requirements for obscenity or damaging issue.”
Hajicek emphasized that her organization also supports the most recent bill that lawmakers have proposed on the subject “because it clarifies what porn is for the common person.”
” In a perfect earth our existing rules may be sufficient”, she told The Federalist.
More than four times after coronavirus lockdowns forced Indiana students to attend classes for extended periods of time, individuals are still struggling in the classroom. Less than 35 % of fourth- and eighth-grade students were reading proficiently, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress ( NAEP ) scores. Clark argued that the low ratings were the result of districts giving kids” crap” like in the book Push.
” The response from the other part is’ we want to boycott publications,'” Clark said. ” Please, I wish institutions were reading the classics. That is such a dark salmon to say that we are “interjecting traditional books” is ridiculous.
