By Jim Heffernan
There is a large banner in the School District 9 meeting room which reads, “The mission of the Tillamook School District is to prepare our students with the academic, artistic, and social skills necessary to become positive contributors to a changing world.”
It’s recited by everyone there at the beginning of each public board meeting. I feel in the August 12 meeting, 3 out of the 4 board members mouthed the words, but failed to follow their mission.
They voted to remove the book, “How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” from the curriculum of the 10th. Grade English Honors class. It’s a book written by Julia Alvarez, a distinquished author of 24 other books. In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts award that was presented to her by President Obama. The book has sold over 250,000 copies, and was cited as an American Library Association Notable Book.
Here’s what Julia Alvarez had to say about it in an interview about the book being banned in a rural North Carolina county in 2008.
”Just as an example: I read an article in which a reporter explained that some parents were upset with the book’s “scene with a pedophile.” This phrase makes it sound as if there is an actual sex scene between an adult and a small child. In fact, the story, “Trespass,” focuses on a shocking encounter in which a young immigrant girl has a very upsetting encounter with a “sexual offender,” who basically “flashes her” and she runs off terrified. Her mother calls the police but the young girl is only just learning English and can’t explain what happened. Now, that’s hardly “a scene with a pedophile.” And the horrible thing for the young girl is that she is disgusted and terrified (as were the concerned parents) but unlike them, she has no power, she has no words, she can’t describe it, she is silenced.
Silenced by her lack of English in the story, and now, silenced by those parents who say her experience is pornographic.
As an educator, I would welcome the opportunity to use a story like this to talk with students about the power of words and stories to convey to others those awful moments when we are bereft, helpless, and need to share our story in order to feel human again.
Students are facing these kinds of challenges in their lives all the time! And one of the great things about literature is that it provides them with a way of talking and feeling and assessing experience within the safe confines of a story and a classroom. Keeping all these issues out of the classroom only leaves our young people with no way to understand, feel, defend themselves against these situations when they happen in “real life.”
I’ve been accustomed to small minded attitudes in places like rural North Carolina, but I thought we were better than that in Tillamook.