The MCS Book Bans Are a Symptom of the School Board’s Failure to Lead
The unintended consequences will reverberate for quite some time.
It’s been a little more than a month since the Marietta City Schools Board of Education ignored hours of work by parents and community members to appeal the 23 books they banned in December. In a show of contempt for district parents, they summarily dispatched all 23 books in a single vote without considering the 500 pages of thoughtful arguments in favor of retaining the books. No matter how badly they want this embarrassing debacle to go away, we continue to field questions from the community about what the heck happened. Today, we give you the full story—one brought to you with piles upon piles of receipts.
Go ahead and top off your coffee, grab a snack, and dig in with us as we look at the timeline of events as they unfolded, including all the places competent leadership could have righted the ship but did not.
MCS: Blue Devils or CCSD Copy Cats?
It all started, as silly things like this often do, in the neighboring Cobb County School District. Libs of TikTok, the far-right anti-LGBT group responsible for instigating book bans across the country, challenged the books Flamer and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl with CCSD. Not a parent. Not a staff member. Not even anyone in the state of Georgia. It was Libs of TikTok (AJC). Cobb County removed the books from their shelves with much fanfare and hysteria, and CCSD Superintendent Chris Ragsdale had a meltdown.
Not our circus. Not our monkeys. Until it was.
On August 31, 2023, Jon Gillooly, MDJ reporter, sent MCS Superintendent Grant Rivera an email (see here) asking if any MCS schools had My Shadow is Purple, Flamer, and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl in their media centers. Rivera responded that no schools had My Shadow is Purple, but that Flamer and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl were in the Marietta High School media center. Gillooly asked for a statement as to why MCS had these two books that CCSD was getting the vapors over, and Rivera responded:
As for the appropriateness of the two texts… I trust the professional judgment of the staff member responsible for ordering media center resources. If a parent wishes to request reconsideration of any book used in the media center, our district would following [sic] the appropriate process for review (as stated in MCS BOE policy IFBD: Media Centers.)
This was the correct answer and should have been the end of the conversation on these two books.
Gillooly then took Rivera’s response and reached out to MCS Board Members for comment (see here). Initially, board member Jeff DeJarnett fumbled around about not having read the books (you were so close, Jeff!). Unfortunately, after reading a few out of context excerpts, he declared both books inappropriate and stated that a “large majority of MCS parents agree with him.” That may be true in the social circles he and many of the board members run in, but it does not appear to be true of the district as a whole.
It’s not even true of the school board. When the MDJ first reached out to board members for comment, then-board chair Kerry Minervini and Irene Berens did find the right answer and echoed Rivera’s remarks. Minervini told the MDJ, “I trust our staff in determining the appropriateness of texts that students can obtain at the media center. The district has a process for review if a parent wishes for a book to be reconsidered.” (MDJ) Berens took the extra step of declaring MCS independence from the CCSD circus, telling the MDJ, "Cobb School District and our neighbor private schools may make decisions as they wish. I want to keep focus on overcoming any barriers to educating our scholars to their highest potential. I echo Grant’s comments." (MDJ) Then the organized pressure campaign began.
Book Banning Begins: RIP Flamer & Earl
Emails obtained by Marietta in the Middle show an organized effort to drum up support for banning Flamer and Earl. Email chains circulating in the West Side part of the district had photos attached of the offending passages in the books. Photos, dear readers, whose metadata (see here) identify a GPS location conveniently central to the Marietta Daily Journal. Did they come from photos attached to the emails that were sent to board members for statements? We will leave it up to your imagination to wonder how privately e-mailed MDJ photos circulated so widely among a small group of elementary school parents and grandparents.
The MDJ ran a story on September 5, 2023 (MDJ) announcing that MCS had the two books that so offended CCSD Superintendent Ragsdale’s delicate psyche, and open records show emails from elementary parents and grandparents referencing the article and asking Rivera and the board to expel the books from the MHS library. The narratives conveyed in these emails portray an organized effort to lobby for a book banning policy; they read as if the same three talking points were handed down from one single source. Exactly none of them had read the books, but they declared them obscene sight unseen. Although the policies surrounding challenges to library content require complaints from parents with children attending the school they are complaining about, we have not acquired evidence in ORRs that confirms any formal complaints were lodged by parents of MHS students. Regardless, both Flamer and Earl were immediately banned from the MHS library. Weeks later, not even the 119 parents, MHS students, teachers, alumni, and community members who co-signed the Flamer appeal could get it reinstated.
In an effort not to let this manufactured crisis go to waste, aspiring book banners on the school board began organizing. Behind the scenes, board members scrambled to put together a directive to Rivera to do this impossible task. Later, the vague distance between policy and directive would be used as an excuse condoning the chaos that ensued. The party line: But some BOE members wanted a policy, and we avoided that! Circling back to the data, though, Jaillene Hunter and Jason Waters appear to be the architects of the plan. Emails we obtained show that Hunter had been lobbying constituents (see here) for a broader policy well before the directive was on the table. In fact, we found evidence of her plan to drastically restrict both media center content and curricula as early as March 2022 (see here). Hunter’s policy, if enacted, could have jump started a chain of censorship that wouldn’t have stopped at the library, but would have necessitated unintended consequences for curriculum. On paper, the BOE claims that the Directive was written by Waters and Orange, (see here) but the circumstantial evidence leads us to believe that Hunter, Waters, and DeJarnett were likely the brains behind the operation. There’s a documented history, dear reader, of these three orchestrating behind the scenes to “pass off” to Orange to take credit, offering their machinations as moderate to the public (see here).
Meanwhile, parents and the community received word that book banning was happening on the down low, pushing back on DeJarnett’s narrative that a majority of parents wanted books banned in the MCS district. Emails from actual high school parents urged caution. Board Chair Kerry Minervini may have doubled down to the media once the Directive was in place, but in private text messages she was in discussion with other board members about the irony of West Side Elementary parents successfully banning books for Marietta High School students (see here). Stakeholders across the district urged the board to slow down. They made clear the decision regarding what students should read lies with the parents of those students and not school board members. They wanted to know what the hurry was. Like the rest of us, they failed to see consultation with experts or their children’s best interest at the forefront of these decisions.
The Board (sans AB Almy) made it clear they don’t care what actual high school parents want for their students. Dozens of emails went unanswered. Calls were ignored or cut short. A handful of elementary school parents and grandparents successfully banned two books they never read, Flamer and Earl, books they had only read about via MDJ screenshots. Once they understood the extent of public outrage against their Directive, the Board could have changed course. Culture wars overshadowed leadership, and the MCS school board lost the trust of its faculty, students, and parents.
MCS Directive Era: An Embarrassing Disaster
Without doing any due diligence, fully considering the workload on staff, or doing so much as a cost analysis, the BOE presented their Directive to the Superintendent at their September 12, 2023 meeting (The Directive). They tossed around some edits and then passed it with zero public comment. Orange declared she did not understand some of the added language and voted for it anyway. They even blindsided their own attorney. (see here) Irene Berens and AB Almy voted against the Directive, but the rest of the Board supported it. Rivera was ordered to remove all books with “sexually explicit materials…defined collectively as obscene, pornographic, not age appropriate and without substantial historical or academic value.”
The Board knew they were asking for a Herculean lift of Rivera and his staff. Later in the Directive they state, “The Board of Education understands this process will take time as there are over 20,000 books in our largest library with some titles dating back as far as the 1970s and 80s.” Had they taken the time to pause, think, and truly understand what they were asking for, they would have known how untenable and expensive implementing their directive would be. Remember that, because by the end of this sordid chapter they will pretend the process worked out as they had intended it to all along.
Folks were livid. Emails obtained via open records requests show at least one major donor to the Marietta Schools Foundation pulled future donations, to the tune of $400 per month, in protest of the bans (see here). Employees cautioned Rivera directly about the harm it would cause to the MCS community (see here). As we mentioned before, 119 MCS stakeholders co-signed the Flamer appeal. Parents and community members spoke to the Board during public comments asking the board to reconsider, presenting evidence about the harm book bans cause students, and reminding board members that parents should be the ones making choices about what their students can read. Board members refused to listen.
Looking for a place to start that would appease the book banners, Rivera and his administration resorted to using national and regional book ban lists to find a list of books to read and review that could give the book banners a token win without emptying the media center’s shelves. (see here) In the meantime, MHS and MMS media center specialists evaluated what was on the shelves using database searches and reviews from professional library resources. Emails obtained via open records requests show one of the lists was from Moms for Liberty (see here), an anti-LGBT extremist group who has been responsible for school library book bans across the country. We talked about this group and why having their influence in our district is so damaging in this post. Another list the administration used was a Florida banned book list, which is heavily influenced by Moms for Liberty. Records show they also used PEN America’s list of most banned books, and as PEN America will tell you, those books are on their list because of efforts by Moms for Liberty.
With an initial list of about 40 books, Rivera assembled a team of teachers and staff to read the books, including completing a vetting worksheet with page numbers of problematic content. These red flags included everything from sexually explicit content to profanity to sexual orientation and racial issues. This group was paid $100 per vetting worksheet for the first list of books they were given and $50 per worksheet for the second list they were given. They were also paid $25 per hour to read the books. Timesheets obtained via open records requests show this group was paid at least $7,576.50 for their work (see here).
While it took weeks for the first round of reviews to be completed, the executive cabinet started to realize that it would take months and hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to truly review the roughly 1,200 or so MHS titles with mature content in them. They were directed to ignore hundreds of Manga titles (see here and here), despite this genre notoriously containing mature content. A combination of research and refined database searches narrowed that list to 700-800 titles. Confronted with the reality that they don’t actually care about exposing students to sexually explicit content, rather, they care about the appearance of caring about sexually explicit content, the BOE secretly added a provision to the directive asking Rivera to focus his search on titles from the past 20 years (see here). This provision protected the so-called “classics” board members wanted to protect, like The Color Purple, but it also added a filter that disproportionately targeted LGBT themed books in their book ban. (see here)
Some board members were adamant about protecting the classics. DeJarnett told the MDJ, “no one is here to get rid of classic literature.” (MDJ) Even Waters supports the classics. The MDJ reported of Waters, “He noted there are classics that may have what some deem to be inappropriate content, but those are not the target of this action.” (MDJ) However, Minervini gave the most full-throated defense of classic literature. The MDJ reports, “Minervini went on to say she could not imagine a district in which prohibited books include classics such as The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, The Color Purple, 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, Romeo and Juliet, The Kite Runner and The Handmaid’s Tale.” She says, “Literature like this, in my opinion, challenges our students to think and look at the world more broadly.” (MDJ)
Remember, friends, this is all about “protecting the children” from sexually explicit content, or so they say. The question we can’t get answered is: why is sexually explicit content not harmful if it is in books deemed subjectively to be “classics” but is harmful if it is in books published within the past 20 years? Either sexually explicit content is “harmful to minors” or it isn’t. It shouldn’t matter whether someone somewhere has deemed a book to be of “academic” or “historical” value. If it’s harmful, it’s harmful.
Pretty Little Liars: BOE Edition
Let’s pause here for a moment, dear readers, and talk about what was the most shocking and disappointing aspect of our research, and that is we’ve had to come to terms with the fact that some members of this school board have no problem misleading the media and the public. Hunter and Waters called books like Flamer and Earl pornography, equating them with Playboy and Hustler (see here). In text messages obtained via open records requests, Hunter is shown coaching fellow board members to tell the media that the books are pornographic (see here and here), that they could not broadcast what the books are about on their stations. After the Board meeting where the appeal to Flamer was rejected, Waters told Atlanta News First that he could not tell them what Flamer was about, inferring it was too lewd for broadcast television. Hunter texted the MDJ that Earl contained “a how-to guide for eating pussy,” a lie we debunked here.
Hunter and Waters were running the Moms for Liberty propaganda playbook using words like “pornographic” and “obscene” to describe books that are neither. When a parent tipped off the MDJ about the 20 year publication date filter to the Directive, Orange claimed that was not true (but remember… see here). The MDJ reported, “Orange said there was no such directive and rejected rumors that the board is mulling one that would protect books 20 years or older from scrutiny. ‘I’m not going to say that that’s been seriously discussed,’ Orange said.” Not only did text evidence expose her lies, but an analysis of the 47 books that were evaluated under the Directive, both those banned and those kept, shows all but six of the books were written after 2002, and of those six, three have been back in the pop culture limelight with movies or television series based on them released since 2002.
Recall that the Board expected Rivera to go through every book in the MHS library as part of the process, without bothering to do their due diligence and run a cost analysis for their Directive. If Rivera had actually done what they asked him to do—review the entire 20,000 title catalog for sexually explicit material—costs would have run well into the tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. This may help inform why Rivera shifted from the costly read-each-book approach to the do-a-wee-googling approach for the remaining 700 mature titles left on the shelves. Titles deemed sexually explicit upon others’ reviews were then considered for a closer look. Some were “vetted” with documentation and others were banned without being read (see here). In public board meetings, Rivera admitted that he did not consider the relative academic or historical value of each book and neglected to inform the public that some titles were not even reviewed. Despite frequent claims of “transparency,” Rivera nor any BOE members disclosed “borrowing banned books from other school districts” as part of their very transparent book banning plan (see here).
In fact, many of the folks paid to read these books were not present at meetings in which decisions were made. Rivera sat around the table with central office staff, reading out loud the out-of-context passages highlighted by his team and decided which books could stay and which ones would be banned based on their perceived level of mature content. Recent legislation in Georgia—SB 226—considers a book “harmful to minors” if it includes passages that contain a description or representation of nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sadomasochistic abuse when taken as a whole is prurient or shameful to minors, would be offensive to the adult community as a whole, and has no literary, artistic, political or scientific value. The legal precedent is the Supreme Court case Miller v. California which states the work must be taken as a whole when deciding whether it is obscene by reasonable community standards. From a legal standpoint, this is an exceedingly high standard to meet; that is, the vast majority of books, even the smutty romance variety, would not come close to meeting the legal definition of obscene in a courtroom.
This yielded a list of 23 books to be banned permanently from the MHS library. Because the process was built on the foundation of banned book lists from and influenced by Moms for Liberty, about half the books had LGBT characters or themes in them. The MHS library contains roughly 100 books in its LGBT section, so LGBT books were vastly overrepresented in the school board’s book bans.
While the take home message and ultimate responsibility for this debacle lies with the failure of our Board of Education, a second pause is warranted here. We need to also zoom in on the decisions of our Superintendent, Grant Rivera. By the time we arrived at the December 12, 2023 board meeting, Marietta in the Middle and our entire community knew how the Board would respond. We did not, however, anticipate that Rivera would so proudly and fervently proclaim that the list of removed books were books that he would have removed even without a directive in place. His statements, which you can listen to yourself here, produced outrage and confusion among parents, students, teachers, and his own central office staff. You see, for months, Rivera had been lamenting publicly and privately to the community that he has to do what the Board tells him to do, that he doesn’t want to ban any books, the board this, the board that, the board is leading the charge and they won’t listen to him. Rivera overlooked multiple opportunities to speak plainly to the public and to hold the board responsible for the mess the board made. He chose not to do that, and in the process, alongside tensions over the dissolution of the Marietta Student Life Center and other losses, Grant Rivera is losing the community’s trust. The MCS BOE opened the floodgates to a nonsensical and distracting culture war, then left Rivera out to sink or swim, all the while holding the renewal of his contract as collateral.
Parent Appeals for Reinstatement Ignored by MCS BOE
On the surface, one good thing the BOE did as part of the Directive was to create an appeals process for parents to reinstate the banned books. These appeals were sent to MHS Principal Marvin Crumbs, or his proxy (in this case, Rivera). Then, if needed, the Board could be appealed to for a final decision. Those of you who have been reading along with us for several months already know the punchline—the appeals process was a sham. (see here) Orange let the cat out of the bag to the MDJ that the appeals process was fake when a parent appealed the removal of Earl (MDJ).
Marietta in the Middle decided to fight for the books anyway. A team of six parents read all the books over Winter Break and wrote appeals arguing the merits of each individual book. The 23 appeal documents totaled more than 500 pages and included evidence-based information on the harm of book bans to students, warning of the discriminatory process of this particular book ban, and explaining the rationale for keeping each book. Eleven parents of MHS students signed on to be the appeals team and submitted them to Rivera by the deadline on January 11.
Board members received all 23 appeals on the morning of Friday, January 12. They dispatched all 23 books in one vote on Tuesday, January 16, just four days later. Note that we lost Irene Berens between the vote on the Directive and the vote on the appeal of Flamer’s removal, but AB Almy stood up for Parent Choice and keeping the books over and over again. Below is a list of each culture war casualty and how it was evaluated:
These books were banned in early September, pre-Directive, even though the district timeline fails to admit this transparently:
Flamer (read and reviewed)
Me and Earl and The Dying Girl (read and reviewed)
Blankets*
This Book is Gay (read and reviewed)
The remaining casualties were removed post-Directive, but also contrary to the “transparent district timeline” some were read and reviewed, some were evaluated on the basis of internet reviews, and some, come to find out, were banned without review at all:
Juliet Takes a Breath (read and reviewed)
Beyond Magenta (read and reviewed)
More Happy Than Not (read and reviewed)
City of Thieves (read and reviewed)
Infinite Moments of Us (read and reviewed)
Crank (read and reviewed)
Perks of Being a Wallflower (read and reviewed)
Monday’s Not Coming (read and reviewed)
13 Reasons Why (read and reviewed)
It Ends With Us (read and reviewed)
Identical (read and reviewed)
I Love You Beth Cooper (read and reviewed)
Grasshopper Jungle (read and reviewed)
The Casual Vacancy (read and reviewed)
All Boys Aren’t Blue (read and reviewed)
Tricks (internet reviews)
Lucky*
A Court of Thorns and Roses*
A Court of Mist and Fury*
A Court of Wings and Ruin*
A Court of Frost and Starlight*
*These titles were banned without anyone from the executive cabinet, the BOE, or the “book clubs” actually reading and/or producing a vetting worksheet on them. MCS disclosed that they were removed on the basis of their removal from a neighboring school district.
Here again was an opportunity for the Board to show leadership. They all could have taken the time to read each appeal—AB Almy did—and put as much thoughtful consideration into evaluating each book as the parents’ group spent writing the appeals. Instead, six out of seven of them could not be bothered to seriously consider the work and efforts of their own constituents. That, alone, tells you all you need to know about the leadership deficits on this school board and the lose-lose circumstances they are willing to force their superintendent and faculty into. They are more concerned with fighting the culture war and appeasing their friends than they are about the staff and students of the school district they lead.
The Bottom Line: Incompetent Leadership Is and Will Continue to Crumble the Academic Integrity of Marietta City Schools
Good leaders learn from past mistakes, and what do we think this school board learned from their book banning boondoggle? From the interview new board chair Jeff DeJarnett and vice-chair Jason Waters gave to the MDJ, it looks like the answer to that question is a big fat nothing (MDJ). They both still insist what they did with the Directive was not a book ban and bristle at anyone who calls it that. DeJarnett applauds the use of discriminatory book ban lists from Moms for Liberty as being a good place to start, ignoring that the use of those homophobic lists discriminated against their own LGBT students and staff:
I think any list that was out there, regardless of where the list came from, provided for Marietta … at least a list to start from. There were books on that list that are still in our library, a lot of them. But there’s books on that list that we then took in and had people decide, is this what we feel like needs to be here or doesn’t need to be here. So it was better than starting from scratch and going, OK, where do we start?
DeJarnett talks about a place to start as if that was the plan all along–find a handful of egregious books and ban those–but that was not what they asked Rivera to do. They wanted the whole library assessed for sexually explicit material and are pretending now they didn’t because of what a colossally bad idea the Directive turned out to be.
Waters is still trying to pass the buck on the book bans to Rivera and his administration. He insists the BOARD didn’t ban the books—Rivera’s administration did—but remember, dear reader, Rivera’s first reaction was to stand behind his media center specialists and trust their judgment. That should have been the end of it. Rivera also repeatedly told community members, his own staff, and students that the MCS BOE was “making him do it.” Everyone knows it was the school board who insisted he go to battle against the library shelves. Good leaders take responsibility for their decisions, both good and bad. This Board, and Waters specifically, need to take responsibility for their decision to bring the culture war crashing down on the MHS media center and the mature content books in it. The buck stops with the Board.
If you have made it this far, dear readers, thank you for hanging in there with us as we wrap up our investigation of the Marietta City Schools book bans. It has taken many hours of pouring through over 12,000 pages of open records documents to piece together what happened behind the scenes of a process that was as muddy and muddled as the Board could make it while claiming total transparency in public.
We have a leadership problem at MCS. This school board has stopped listening to parents other than those close to them and is putting the culture war ahead of student achievement. Documents caught in our past open records requests hint at other problems in the district, and we are getting reports from parents across MCS of books being censored in classrooms after students have started reading them. We are also beginning to peel back the layers of the onion that’s the gutting of the Student Life Center at MHS from the details in the lawsuit filed against the school board (see here), but so far the common denominator has rung true: our school board, whether willfully antagonistic or simply ignorant of best practices, is incapable of leading our administration, faculty, and students to a bright future. Our community must act.
The good news is, MCS is a nimble little school district beloved by the community, and we can rebuild what has been lost with better leadership. It may take a few years, but together we can right the ship and bring Special Different Better back to Marietta City Schools. Continue reading if you’re interested in helping us get there.
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