The Education Department’s Baseless Crusade against a Georgia School District

I n a disturbing act of federal overreach, the Department of Education said in a letter to Georgia’s Forsyth County Schools superintendent that the school district’s book-review process may have created a hostile environment for students, thereby violating civil-rights law. The letter came after months of heated debate within the FCS community, particularly among parents and students, over whether books with sexually explicit scenes should be in the district’s middle-school libraries. Instead of allowing the local community to navigate its disagreements, the Biden DOE’s Office for Civil Rights stepped in, making baseless and tangential claims that the disagreements in and of themselves caused students of color and LGBTQI+ students to experience a discriminatory environment.

Liberal media outlets have characterized the Education Department’s actions as historic. The Washington Post, for instance, implied that the Education Department is protecting “books that deal with race, racism, and LGBTQ characters and themes,” noting the non-white and LGBTQ identities of the authors or of the characters of some of the books that the Georgia school district had considered removing. But the FCS debate was not about the authors of these books or their characters; it was about maintaining children’s innocence. Equally important is that removing the books was a local decision, and by intervening the federal government is abusing its power to enforce partisan preferences on a school district.

By the time the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights letter was sent in May, the parents of Forsyth County Schools had been protesting for months the presence of sexually graphic books in FCS libraries, regularly showing up to education-board meetings to speak:

“My kid came home to me with pornography.”

“If it’s porn, if it’s obscenity, our kids should not be allowed to read it.”

“You’ve got a mother begging you to do something.”

In January 2022, the district decided to remove eight books from its school libraries.

Cindy Martin, chairwoman of the Mama Bears of Forsyth County, a parental-rights group, told me that those eight books “did not even come close to the amount of sexually explicit books that needed to be removed.”

On March 15, 2022, FCS mom Alison Hair approached the podium on the verge of tears and begged the school board to take action. Hair began to read an excerpt from her son’s middle-school library book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but was gaveled down by the board for profanity while reading aloud a descriptive sex scene.

This was Hair’s second failed attempt to read the book at a school-board meeting. Within months, the Institute for Free Speech had filed a lawsuit on behalf of Hair, the Mama Bears of Forsyth County, and Martin. In November 2022, a federal judge ruled the FCS board’s public-participation policy unconstitutional, stating that Hair could not be forced to limit her speech so that she could speak at board meetings. FCS paid $107,500 in the plaintiffs’ legal fees and $17.91 in damages — 1791 being the year of the First Amendment’s ratification.

The summer after the removal of the eight books, a committee formed by the school district, including teachers, media specialists, and parents, reviewed them by taking into account, in addition to the books’ content, the authors’ and book characters’ cultural characteristics and gender identities. In early August, seven of the eight books were allowed back to the district’s high schools only, Martin explained, where the staff of each school could then decide whether to reshelve them.

In the meantime, however, an anonymous community member filed a complaint against the FCS with the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging that the school district discriminated against students on the basis of sex, race, color, and national origin, which turned the local issue into a national one. In its letter, released on May 23, 2023, and addressed to the school-district superintendent, the OCR detailed the results of its investigation, concluding that the district’s book-screening may have created a hostile environment for students, which the district failed to ameliorate.

Despite the fact that the books were screened for sexually explicit material only, the OCR letter claims that “communications at board meetings conveyed the impression that books were being screened to exclude diverse authors and characters, including people who were LGBTQI+ and authors who are not white, leading to increased fears and possibly harassment.” It turns out that, nowadays, “safetyism,” besides trumping all other practical and moral concerns, has also drastically lowered the threshold for what might be considered a civil-rights violation.

The OCR letter states that, at school-board meetings, some parents challenged books related to gender and sexual identity and “made negative comments about diversity and inclusion or critical race theory.” The fact is that however opposed parents may have been to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programming, critical race theory, or gender ideology, this wasn’t even considered by the book-screening committees. The letter itself acknowledges that screening was limited to sexually explicit material. Moreover, anyone who watches the numerous publicly available videos of parents speaking at FCS board meetings will conclude that parents did not oppose the abstract concepts of diversity and inclusion, as implied by the letter, but rather the underlying race essentialism of DEI philosophy, which places their children into a few select identity-based boxes and tells them that these categories determine their moral status.

The OCR’s letter then turns to comments made by high-school students against the book removals and in support of a DEI program. It describes students’ claims that they feel afraid at school, having lost their “safe spaces.” The questioning of whether sexually explicit books belong in their school library, the students believe, translated to their losing the “comfort” of books with characters who look like them, which they need to feel represented. Instead of removing explicit content from its libraries, the students claim that the school district was silencing minority voices, dismissing diversity, and singling out people who were not cisgender, heterosexual, white, and male. The students claimed, moreover, that county residents will view the book removals as a “green light to continue their bigotry” (meaning, in this case, their opposition to obscenity in middle- and high-school libraries). One student asked how those in the majority would become aware of their “privilege,” the life-changing advantages they enjoy because of their identity, without these books.

But the dots of the students’ claims — which the OCR presents as truth — do not connect. Parents at board meetings were expressly protesting “content so pornographic that you would not let us read it here.” One parent, who is Asian, pointed out that this was about content and had nothing to do with the authors’ race. He even went on to list diverse authors whose books were acceptable for school libraries, such as Thomas Sowell, hearteningly offering to continue the conversation over lunch with anyone who disagreed. Another parent, a Cuban immigrant, said that his family hasn’t experienced discrimination and feels warmly welcomed by the Forsyth community. He and other like-minded parents explained, however, that they don’t want their eleven-year-olds reading about “BJs” or “pasties” or how “strippers are supposed to be pretty.”

Yet the OCR omitted such inconvenient information from its letter, embracing safetyism as gospel. Not a single incident of harassment was cited; parents’ desires to keep their children innocent was evidence enough that the district may have created a discriminatory, hostile environment for its students, thereby violating Title VI and Title IX laws. Even though the school district reinstated the obscene books it had so egregiously removed, “the federal government is forcing our county to post notices in all of our middle and high schools that they do not discriminate against gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation,” Martin told me.

The Education Department’s actions should concern us all. Under the Biden administration, a federal agency has decided that its deeming certain mainstream views “unsafe” may be used as a weapon against local communities who make decisions that diverge from partisan orthodoxy in an effort to protect their children. Forsyth County Schools’ hands are tied. In the eyes of a select group of students, the school district is bigoted and needs to repent. In the eyes of the federal government, empowering that select group is a worthwhile cause, even if it means bending the truth and interrupting local democratic processes.