Edha Gupta and Christina Ellis, two senior high school in York County, Pennsylvania, were very angry when they read last month in local newspapers whose teachers had been effectively prohibited from using hundreds of books, documentaries and articles in their classrooms.
Register, which was made in 2020 by the diversity committee in the Central Society District, was intended to serve as a resource guide for students and teachers when they wrestle with race and social turmoil that followed the murder of George Floyd.
It includes a documentary about James Baldwin and a statement about racism by the State School Administrator Association.
It also includes children’s books like “a boy named Bat,” about a third grade student with autism and “I Rosa Parks”.
But what began in an effort to raise awareness somehow ended with material in the list that was prohibited from classrooms by the district school board in the small voting last November.
Some parents in the district have objected to the ingredients they worry about can be used to make white children feel guilty about their race or “indoctrinate” students.
“I am ready to go to war,” Ellis said, 17.
He and Gupta, 17, recruited other students to wear a black shirt to school as a protest.
They created signs that read “diversity is our strength” they began to protest every day before school.
They began writing letters to editors and read quotes from prohibited books on Instagram.
Controversy attracted national media attention.
Bernice King, Princess Martin Luther King Jr., and some writers whose books are in the list of support voicing.
On September 13, the school board met to discuss the list but once again chose to keep the ingredients used in class.
Students continue their protests.
Less than three weeks after students started their campaign, the council met again, on September 20, and while lifting freezing.
The Board said that November 2020 voting was not intended to be a ban, but an effort to provide curriculum panel time to review the material.
Jane Johnson, the President of the School Board, said that while the Board recognizes the importance of diversity, it is concerned about the ingredients that “can be slimmer to indoctrination than academic content that is suitable.”