Catherine Durkin Robinson is a handful, creating quite a scene over at Out in Left Field.
Several months ago, two concerned parents emailed the principal of Plant High School, challenging a book listed as suggested reading in a class where juniors and seniors earn college credit.
One of them said his daughter, a junior, is now forever changed because she read Running with Scissors.
“My child has been robbed of some of the innocence of her childhood,” he wrote, “and this can not (sic) be undone.”
After a school board member and district employee joined the parents as complainants, they asked each school to remove the book from circulation and the card catalog.
This alarmed Christine VanBrunt, supervisor of library media services for the district. In one email, she wrote,
“District procedures require that books go through the district's challenge process before being removed permanently from school media center collections. The challenge process should be completed for this book, so a precedent is not set for removing books without following district procedures. Removing books without following this process could open the door to removing books on a personal and subjective basis rather than by a set of standards.”
Within a few weeks, nine panels convened and voted on a solution. Then the media specialists met this week to present their final report.
This article appears in Mar 24-30, 2010.