Walk out staged during Brandywine School Board meeting

 

NILES, Mich. -- Parents, teachers, and members of the Brandywine Educational Freedom group walked out as a 12-minute-long ‘Porn Pandemic’ video was played to show how pornography is negatively affecting youth.

Some board members including President Thomas Payne, notably a part of the partisan ‘We the Parents’ group, associates some young adult books with sexually explicit content in it as pornography.

After the video, the board discussed ‘suspending accessibility to selected books’, which would create a policy for checking out certain books with any sexually explicit content.

It’s not a final decision yet, but the recommended policy would be for any student under the age of 16 to get a signed permission slip from a parent to get access to those books. Students older than 16 would be allowed to check out those books freely unless a parent takes that access away from them.
Those that are against banning books say pornography has nothing to do with the books in the library.

“I know there’s some controversy about the books in our library and they keep calling them pornography which they’re not, it’s against the law for libraries, even public libraries to have pornography in their library,” says Debbie Carew, President of the Teacher’s Association and English teacher at Brandywine. “So I don’t exactly understand the purpose of this, it has nothing to do with what we do here.”

The policy that is decided on by the board would be put into the student handbook for the next school year.
The board says the student handbook would need to be finalized by June 12, so they hope to have a policy set in place by then.