Every week at All Saints Church we put our faith into action. This week we are asking our members to sign a petition to the Burbank Unified School Board objecting to their banning of several books dealing with the subject of race in America.
In September, the Burbank Unified School Board “firmly requested” that teachers stop teaching four books: Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, Theodore Taylor’s The Cay, and Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, following complaints from a small number of parents.
The Children’s and Young Adult Committee of PEN America, an organization devoted to the freedom to read, co-signed a letter from the National Coalition Against Censorship urging the district to reinstate the books. The district responded by affirming the ban.
The Burbank school district has over 15,000 students, and we believe that each of them deserves the opportunity to read and grapple with these literary classics. School district officials should be providing educators with the resources they need to teach these books responsibly and effectively. Instead, Burbank’s school district is coming dangerously close to rubber-stamping a book ban that will affect what more than 15,000 students can read in class. In this petition, we are urging the Board to allow these books to be taught, and to reject calls to ban them from their schools’ curriculum.
