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  • 2022-08-18 (xsd:date)
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  • Were Anne Frank's Diary and the Bible 'Banned' by a Texas School District? (en)
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  • In August 2022, we received mail from readers that asked if Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl and the Bible were both banned by a Texas school district. A seemingly endless number of Facebook posts and news headlines made this specific claim. We soon found that there were a lot of moving parts to this story, many of which were being misunderstood by social media users due to its complexity. On Aug. 8, 2022, a new policy was enacted in the Keller Independent School District in Keller, Texas. The town is located north of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. According to The Times of Israel, this policy established new guidelines for responding to parental book challenges: The new policy required a fresh review of a list of 41 books that had been previously challenged, many of which were then approved to remain on shelves. The books had been challenged either by parents or community members. Some of the books that had been approved to stay on school shelves during that process contained sexually explicit content, according to a video published by the Keller ISD Family Alliance YouTube channel: Aside from the books mentioned in above video, the list of 41 previously challenged items included a graphic novel edition of Frank's diary that was first published in 2018, titled, Anne Frank's Diary: The Graphic Adaptation. The Bible also made the list. According to the Keller ISD website, each of the two books had apparently been challenged by a lone parent. The graphic novel version of Frank's work purportedly contains references to female genitalia, same-sex attraction, and other sexual matters, according to the reporting from The Times of Israel. At the same time, the more than 50 copies of the standard edition of Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl that were available in the school district's libraries were never challenged or removed from shelves, according to a statement from the superintendent, Rick Westfall. This was one fact that wasn't mentioned in many of the popular Facebook posts about this rumor. The New York Times reported that, on Aug. 16, just hours before the first day of classes for the new year, a school administrator sent an email [...] to principals and librarians to tell them to remove certain books that had been challenged by the end of the day. This was because of the aforementioned new policy and guidelines of Aug. 8. That email was then reported on by various news websites, which led to the brouhaha that blossomed out of misinformed social media posts. All of this commotion led to Westfall issuing his statement on the Keller ISD website. A key part of Westfall's statement read as follows: In the process of researching the facts behind this story, we viewed a YouTube video that showed one member of Keller ISD’s Board of Trustees expressing concerns about one of the books on the list. However, this book was not the graphic novel of Frank's work, nor was it the Bible. We have chosen to not link to this video since it mentions the board member's children. In sum, no, the Keller ISD in Texas did not ban Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl or the Bible, as misleading Facebook posts claimed. According to the school district's updated list of Current Book Challenges, both books were re-evaluated, approved, and returned to circulation as of Aug. 19. (en)
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