Honored Book Pulled From Tampa School’s Shelves

An award-winning young-adult book was pulled from the shelves of an elementary school after a review committee determined it was inappropriate for the grade level. “The Land,” by Mildred Taylor, will be collected and put on library shelves in middle schools instead.

Ashyaa Brown, an 11-year-old fifth-grader at Turner Elementary School who was reading the book as part of an accelerated reader program, found racial epithets in the book and complained to her father, Darryl, who complained to the school district.

Each school has its own review committee and the nine-member committee at Turner Elementary School in New Tampa met two weeks ago.

“The committee decided that the book, “The Land,” will be removed from the media center at Turner and will be sent to library technical services to be donated to a middle school,” the report said.

“The subject matter of ‘The Land’ is above the maturity level of elementary students at Turner,” the report said. “Several factors influenced this decision including sexual overtones, brutality/violence and racial slurs. The consensus of the committee spoke to the author’s purpose of the story and the accurateness of this historical account of the author’s ancestors.

Source: Tampa Tribune

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 and is filed under Access to Information, Education, Libraries and Librarianship, Search News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.