Moms for Liberty files 189 Wake book challenges in past week. Why all were rejected.

Moms for Liberty, the group at the forefront of a national effort to get some books removed from schools, filed nearly 200 challenges in the past week about 20 books it says are too explicit for Wake County school libraries.

The school system rejected all the challenges, meaning the books will stay.

“Parents are not going to sit here and let this sexually explicit, vulgar, obscene and erotic and tell all how to do it everything sex rated stuff ... be in school libraries,” Julie Page, a parent and chair of the Wake chapter of Moms for Liberty, said in an interview.

The Wake chapter filed 189 challenges on May 30-31 against 20 books, such as “Sex Plus: Learning, Loving, and Enjoying Your Body,” “Gender Queer” and “Lawn Boy.” The group claims the material in those books is vulgar, pornographic and not appropriate for students to read.

Page said she only filed challenges at the schools where she knew the books were located. Most of the challenges involved books in high school libraries.

In an email on Thursday to Page, Wake says the challenges are invalid because they weren’t filed by parents at the individual schools where the books are. Allison Reid, Wake’s acting chief technology officer, said it is “not tenable” that the use of a book at one school could be challenged by a parent from another school.

“Interpreting the policy and regulation to allow parents who do not have children in attendance at a particular school to file formal challenges and have a book removed from that school’s media center would be unfair to the parents of students who do attend that school,” Reid wrote.

“Interpreting the policy and regulation to allow any WCPSS parent to challenge any material used in any school would mean, in theory, that students could be denied access to a library book even if not a single student or parent at that school objected to its content.”

The requests come as the school system is considering new rules that would limit how often book challenges can be filed. Previously, only five book challenges have been filed in Wake since 2021.

“I fully support their right as parents to not have their child read a book in the school library,” Renee Sekel, a parent who has opposed the book challenge efforts, said in an interview. “What I do not support is them infringing on my right as a parent to have my child read books in the school library.”

Moms for Liberty active nationally

Moms for Liberty members have spoken at school board meetings across the nation and in North Carolina.

This week, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a report that labeled Moms for Liberty as an “anti-government extremist group.” The organization has fired back, calling it a “leftist attack, political hit job,” USA Today reported.

Earlier this school year, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system removed two books from some high school libraries following complaints from the Mecklenburg chapter of Moms for Liberty, the Charlotte Observer reported.

One of those books: “Sex Plus: Learning, Loving, and Enjoying Your Body” is among the 20 challenged by Moms for Liberty’s Wake chapter. It’s described by Harper Collins Publishers as a book that will “help you take control of your sex life.”

School librarians, locally and nationally, have urged the public to trust their judgment in selecting the books that students can find.

“I can’t believe I have to say this, but here it goes,” Julie Stivers, the librarian of Mt. Vernon Middle School in Raleigh, said at an April school board meeting in Wake. “We are not, and I quote, ‘peddlers of pornography.’ I am a middle school librarian. I choose books that are a good age fit for middle school students.”

Stivers was recently named the National School Librarian of the Year.

These are the 20 books that Moms for Liberty sought to remove from Wake school libraries

Criminal complaints and accusations of ‘erotic smut’

Page says the efforts in Wake are a grassroots effort of concerned parents.

“We have minds of our own, and we decided to act on this,” Page said. “We had no idea that this erotic smut was in K-12 public schools until the last couple of years.”

Speakers now regularly read at school board meetings explicit excerpts from books that they want removed. On Tuesday, Dana Ramos read excerpts of scenes featuring vaginal and oral sex from “What Girls Are Made Of,” a novel which tells the story of a teenage girl.

“Why is vulgar erotica in our schools for minors?” Ramos said. “Please explain how this has literary value or supplements academics?”

Page was among a group of people who in December 2021 filed criminal complaints accusing the Wake County school system of violating obscenity laws based on some of the books in school libraries. But Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman announced she would not file criminal charges.

A month earlier, in November 2021, Page had filed a grievance asking the school system to remove those 20 books or to require parental consent before students could check them out from school libraries.

Book challenges rejected

Page said that she filed the individual challenges last week after Wake declined to handle them at a district level. Most of the challenges were sent to high schools, a few to middle schools and one to an elementary school for the book “It’s Perfectly Normal.”

“It’s been a culmination of 18 months of being pushed back and pushed off from their obligations as a school system to take up the issue in the way the policy outlines,” Page said. “It should never have come to this.”

Under the challenge process, the principal would have to form a committee to review requests. The committee’s decision can be appealed to the school board.

Among proposed revisions to the challenge process that the school board is considering would be that decisions are binding for two years before a new challenge could be filed again at a school against a previously challenged book there.

The updated policy explicitly says that challenges at the school level must be made by parents at that school. Page says that requirement isn’t listed in the current book challenge policy so any Wake parent can file a request.

But in Wake’s letter on Thursday, Reid gives multiple reasons why she says only school-level challenges can be filed by parents at that school. She said the school-based review committee looks at whether the challenged material “violates the constitutional or other legal rights of the parent or student.”

Reid said it’s not possible for a book at Fuquay-Varnia High’s library to violate the rights of a student who attends Richland Creek Elementary in Wake Forest.

“The policy and regulation are designed to allow parents to challenge instructional materials and media center books housed or used at the school their children attend,” Reid wrote.

“Unless the Board of Education decides to expand the scope of the policy to expressly allow any parent of any WCPSS student to challenge instructional materials or books found at any WCPSS, this is the final position of the WCPSS administration on this question.”

Page said Friday that she is reviewing the district’s email to determine what steps, if any, to take next.