I don’t remember the Keller Independent School District making national headlines when I was a student here in the 1980s. Even back then, this North Texas community — which began with a railroad extension from Fort Worth in the 1850s — was growing.
But in my time at Keller High School, then the district’s only high school, Keller was still more farm town than burgeoning suburb. We had one grocery store along U.S. 377 and no McDonald’s — I drove to nearby North Richland Hills to flip Quarter Pounders my junior and senior years.
An old gray water tower that proclaimed “Keller: Home of the Indians” greeted visitors to our town, referring to the school mascot. I edited the student newspaper The Wigwam, played sousaphone in the marching band and graduated 23rd in a class of about 300 in 1986. The next year, our former drum major, Michelle Royer, won the Miss USA Pageant — the biggest news I recall from those days.
My parents still live in the area, so I visit frequently and have witnessed Keller’s explosive growth, including multiple exits along Interstate 35.
This week, I’ve watched with interest as the Keller school district’s decision to remove 41 books from its libraries, including the Bible and an illustrated version of “Anne Frank’s Diary,” has made headlines everywhere from the Texas Tribune to the New York Times. What in the world is happening?
Basically this: The national culture wars have come to the local school board. And not just in Keller.
A previous Plug-in highlighted stories by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Emily Brindley and The Tennessean’s Liam Adams on school board candidates campaigning on Christianity and conservatism.
Each of the books pulled in Keller — including the Bible — was challenged by a parent, lawmaker or other community member in the last year, USA Today’s Jeanine Santucci reports.
The Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner points out:
“Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” is an illustrated version of the bestselling classic written by a young Jewish girl in the Netherlands as she and her family hid from Nazi occupation forces. The story ended when the Franks were captured and sent to concentration camps; Anne and her sister Margot died, most likely of typhus, in the Bergen-Belsen camp. Her father Otto survived and published the diary, which had been hidden by his secretary, after the war.
Several of the challenged books listed by the Keller Independent School District on its website deal with mature or LGBTQ themes, such as “Keeping You A Secret” by Julie Anne Peters, “If You Could be Mine” by Sara Farizan, and “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson.
At the Washington Post, María Luisa Paúl offers this crucial context:
Keller is one of 20 school districts in Tarrant County, a politically divided area where Joe Biden won by just 1,826 votes in the 2020 presidential election. The election results kindled a conservative push to take over school boards in the county, Hawes said. Patriot Mobile Action, a Christian political action committee based in Texas, endorsed and funded the campaigns of 11 school board candidates across the county, who all won. Three of them joined Keller’s seven-person board of trustees in May.
One of their first moves was revisiting the district’s book selection. On Aug. 8, the new board adopted two policies endorsed by the state’s department of education relating to the acquisition and review of instructional materials and library books.
This is important, too: The review of the books before possibly returning them to the shelves is part of a national trend, as the Deseret News’ Kelsey Dallas explains:
The Deseret News covered this trend in March, noting that school districts and state legislatures across the country are debating whether to protect schoolchildren from sensitive or concerning (at least to some) material.
“What you’re seeing is how much we do not trust teachers to have the expertise in what they do. It’s really the job of the teacher to say, ‘This is the best book for my curriculum and this is how I’m teaching it,’” said Emily Knox, an associate professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who studies intellectual freedom and censorship, to the Deseret News at the time.
Anna Salton Eisen, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, lives in the Keller district and is among those protesting the books’ removal.
“At a time when we need to learn from history how to be better humans and citizens, which are some of the important lessons of the Holocaust,” Eisen told me, “we are instead mimicking the book banning and limiting ideas, which was the hallmark of the Nazis.”
But Charles Randklev, the school board’s president, defends the review.
“Per the new policy, instructional materials previously challenged following the old policy, which was flawed and exposed children to pornographic material … will be re-evaluated,” Randklev said on Facebook. “The challenge process for these materials will go through a committee composed of community and staff members, which will be open to the public and video and audio recorded.”
It doesn’t sound like my old hometown will return to its quiet, sleepy days anytime soon.
Power Up: The Week’s Best Reads
1. Sacred rivers: “Rivers provide wondrous gifts — nourishment, mobility, irrigation, natural beauty. Some cultures consider the rivers of their realms to be sacred,” The Associated Press’ global religion team notes.
“Today, even as these rivers remain an object of devotion, some face dire threats,” the team adds.
AP explores those threats in an ambitious six-part series:
1. New Zealand river’s personhood status offer to Māori (by Nick Perry)
2. Colombia River’s salmon are at the core of ancient religion (by Deepa Bharath)
3. Nepal’s holy Bagmati River choked with black sewage, trash (by Binaj Gurubacharya)
4. Jordan River, Jesus’ baptism site, is today barely a trickle (by Mariam Fam)
5. Nigeria’s Osun River: Sacred, revered and increasingly toxic (by Chinedu Asadu)
6. Giovanna Dell'Orto’s story from Chile will be published Saturday.
2. Ukrainian clergy say Russian occupiers target them with threats, violence: Ian Lovett, the Wall Street Journal’s national religion reporter, normally is based in Los Angeles but has spent recent months working in Ukraine.
In this compelling piece, Lovett talks to priests who “say they face assaults if they refuse Russian demands to collaborate and influence the local population.”
CONTINUE READING: “Why My Old School District Removed 41 Books, Including The Bible, From Its Libraries' “ by Bobby Ross, Jr., at Religion Unplugged.