Why Did A Pennsylvania School District Ban 'Girls Who Code' Books?

The answer will in no way surprise you.

Last week, at the start of Banned Books Week, PEN America released its annual list of books banned in schools across the United States. As usual, there were more than a few selections that defy any explanation at all — chief among them being a series of books about the adventures of girls who belong to a coding club at their school.

Saturday, Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani was awakened by an alert on her phone letting her know that the "Girls Who Code" book series had been banned from classrooms in the Central York School District in Pennsylvania. On Twitter, she attributed the ban to the Moms for Liberty group that has notoriously been going around pushing book bans in schools across the nation.

“I woke up this morning to a news alert that our @GirlsWhoCode middle-grade book series was banned by some school districts as part of the Mom for Liberty effort to ban books. To be honest, I am so angry I cannot breathe. https: //t.co/5rBJkcGQDV”

— reshmasaujani (@reshmasaujani) 1664032621 

Via Business Insider:  

"I was just shocked," Saujani told Insider. "This is about controlling women and it starts with controlling our girls and what info they have access to."

The Girls Who Code books were banned specifically by Pennsylvania's Central York School District, located in a critical political swing region where Saujani said the organization has an active club. But she said the move is part of a larger effort by Moms for Liberty, a conservative organization that advocates for parental rights in schools, including oversight of educational material.

"In some ways we know that book banning has been an extreme political tool by the right — banning books to protect our kids from things that are 'obscene' or 'provocative' — but there is nothing obscene or provocative about these books," she told Insider.

Other books banned by the Central York School District include such controversial-sounding titles as A Is for Audra: Broadway's Leading Ladies from A to Z ; Condoleeza Rice: Being The Best; Duke Ellington: The Piano Prince and his Orchestra' Elizabeth Blackwell: The First Woman Doctor; Grace Hopper: Queen of Computer Code; I Love My Hair!; Muffin Wars; The Case for Loving: The Fight for Interracial Marriage; I Am Rosa Parks; Who Was Lucille Ball? and about a hundred others. Many of the books have a common thread in that they acknowledge that Black people or women of any color exist and do things. To be fair, this is very controversial.

There is good news: this ban has already been defeated. Yay! The bad news is that it was all very stupid from beginning to end.

Here's what actually happened: In September of 2020, in response to the killing of George Floyd and other issues in the news at the time, teachers in the district put together "a list of books and educational resources for teachers and students to use as the local community, like the rest of the nation, struggled to make sense of the murder of George Floyd and the deep racial and social strife that ensued."

However, the very conservative and very white school board did not like that one bit, and banned all those books and resources and every book in every series associated with those books, and a bunch of other books they didn't like, just to be safe.

Rather than just letting them have their way, angry parents, teachers and students banded together, organized, protested and refused to stop until the school board rescinded the ban a year later. 

  "I was very frustrated and I was also very angered by it," teacher Ben Hodge told the Bucks County Beacon. He continued:

Which is why later on as the summer progressed in 2020, we went out and started and led the two community protests in September and November of 2020 as a response to the narrative and to the words and the comments and the anti-diversity rhetoric that was coming out of it and how that was not in line with the standards and what we have historically stood for as a district. Our hashtag line for that, those first two rallies were, ' This is not the Central I Know,' and it was community members and teachers who were going out and saying very simply that this is not what Central stands for.

Even as the ban was rescinded, supporters of the ban cried that they weren't trying to get rid of the inoffensive books, and were OK with students having books about Rosa Parks, they were merely concerned about books that might have critical race theory in them somewhere. Or pornography!

One commenter offered a defense for banning a couple of the books on what was called the “Diversity Resource List.” The woman, a parent in the district named Christina Hardesty, said she did not object to benign books, such as “Who is Rosa Parks?” and “Who is Jesse Owens?”, but she did object to others that she believed teach critical race theory and promote socialism and communism.

Another supporter of removing books from the list, Jennifer Hyman, said the books were a “smokescreen” to indoctrinating students in critical race theory. She accused the former superintendent, Michael Snell, of trying to introduce a critical race theory takeover in the district. She urged those listening to “educate themselves about critical race theory” and to be vigilant of “radicals within our ranks.”

The nice thing for those two ladies is that they will never know if any of those books contained any "critical race theory," because they very clearly have absolutely no idea what it even is. It could be muffins, for all they know!

Unfortunately, there are still a whole lot of districts on the PEN America list that are still banning books, and we've still got Moms for Liberty and other conservative groups mobilizing across the country to get books they dislike banned in schools and libraries. If we're going to defeat those bans the way they did in the Central York school district, then we're going to have to be just as adamant, just as outraged and just as persistent as they are.

[ Business Insider / Bucks County Beacon / York Daily Record ]

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