Local students react to school board’s decision to remove five books from curriculum

PALMER — In the wake of the recent decision by the Mat-Su Borough School Board to remove five books and the New York Times journalism curriculum from being used in the Mat-Su Borough School District’s curriculum, some students voiced their displeasure of the decision. The books removed from the English curriculum were “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou, “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller and “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien.

“You’re about to be an adult,” Preston Kulhanek, a senior at Redington Jr/Sr High School said regarding teenagers being exposed to the controversial material in the removed literature.

Of the five, Kulhanek has read “The Great Gatsby” and questioned the logic behind removing it. Many other works being taught also contain sexual references and adverse language, Kulhanek claimed. He recalled the rape case in the plot of “To Kill a Mockingbird” and how the language used is “more derogative towards rape and stereotyping black people.”

Emerson Moser, a senior at Mat-Su Career and Technical High, understood the argument behind removing some of the novels.

“But it’s understandable why the board removed the ‘Invisible Man’ and ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ from its curriculum list due to the contents of the books and the improbable idea that parents are to know the content of those books and requests alternative assignments for their children in school,” Moser wrote.

He has read some of the “Invisible Man” and has not read “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”

Jim Hart, vice president of the MSB School Board, voiced the main concerns about Angelou’s and Ellison’s novels. Paraphrasing chapters after he read the summaries from sparknotes.com, Hart said that Angelou vividly depicted child molestation. Hart also informed the body that Ellison wrote in his novel about how to win over the favor of white people by selling them stories about incest.

Amy Spargo, the assistant superintendent of instruction clarified for the board that Alaska statue grants parents the right to opt out of curriculum they want their student to not participate in, and in this case can choose another book from the reading list.

“Personally, I disagree with removing the ‘Great Gatsby’ and ‘The Things They Carried’,” Moser wrote. “I have had both books in my classes and found them useful in learning conventions of writing and higher level English analysis.”

The reasons behind labeling these books as controversial are listed in the MSBSD High School English Electives Round 1 Controversial Book Descriptions. Each of the five novels had with one or more of the following descriptions: “profanity,” “sexual references,” “violence,” “rape and incest,” “anti-white messaging,” and “racial slurs.”

“I think as high school students, we’re almost adults,” Dani Farley, a junior at Palmer High School, wrote.

Though Farley has yet to read the removed novels, she disagrees with the removals based on the explicit topics and language used in them.

“As far as profanities, reading them does not encourage us to use them. It is part of the language and it’s important to accurately convey the language from whatever culture of time that story was written about,” Farley wrote. “The stories that are taught are not far-fetched. Very similar things occur in real life, and therefore there is some truth in the stories we are taught.”

Anthony Jones is a senior at Mat-Su Career and Technical School and a Frontiersman intern for the 2019-20 school year.