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School Substitutes 'Diary of Anne Frank' After Parent Complains
Filed under: In The News
In a Virginia school district, one version of Anne Frank's diary has been substituted with another. Credit: Doubleday
"The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Version" has been removed from Culpeper County Public Schools due to a complaint by a parent, according to the Culpeper Star-Exponent. The Virginia school district has substituted the unedited version, which the Anne Frank Foundation published in 1995, with the previously published edition.
Culpeper, located approximately 70 miles southwest of Washington, D.C., has a school district that serves 7,600 students, according to The Washington Post.
The widely-read diary -- often assigned to middle school students -- details the life of Anne Frank, who lived in a "Secret Annex" from July 1942 until August 1944. The annex was discovered by the Nazis and Frank was sent to her death in a concentration camp. The sole survivor of the family, Otto Frank, originally published an edited diary in 1947.
Last fall, after students had read the book, a parent complained in person to school authorities about "the sexual nature of the vagina passage," the Star-Exponent reports.
Jim Allen, the school district's director of instruction, tells the Star-Exponent that "school officials immediately chose to pull this version and use an alternative copy." The "school system did not follow its own policy for handling complaints about instructional materials," the Post reports.
The Star-Exponent details the district's process for removing a book, which includes receiving a written complaint, convening a committee and making a recommendation.
In a follow-up e-mail to the Star-Exponent, Bobbi Johnson, the district's superintendent, defended its decision.
"The essence of the story, the struggle of a young girl faced with horrible atrocities, is not lost by editing the few pages that speak to adolescent discovery of intimate feelings," she writes.
"CCPS never fails to disappoint me," is a sample of the reader reactions on the Culpeper Star-Exponent Web site. Much of the response has been against the substitution.
Related: Banned Words List for 2010 Released
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ReaderComments (Page 1 of 1)
1-29-2010 @ 8:53PM
Rebecca said...I am sooooooo sick of ONE parent making a stink and everyone has to suffer. When I was in Junior High, my class read a book my mother didn't like (this was 1972). I read a different book - problem solved. Everyone else read what the curriculum required; everyone was happy. Why does everyone have to suffer because ONE parent get's his/her nighty in a knot. Whatever happened to majority rules. Why do we cater to the squeaky wheel so much?
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1-31-2010 @ 6:22AM
LOU said...If one parent so strongly opposes the book, let that child read the alternate version. This parent will probably be asking someone to make an exception for their child's entire life. Why deprive the whole school of an education of great historical importance. If this parent thinks the book was too graphic, I wonder what they'd think if they could see their own child's private thoughts. I've got news for them VAGINA is one of them.
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