SCHOOL BOARD

Write a story based on the following information. Deadline: 40 minutes.

You’re covering the Marshfield School Board, which oversees the public schools in Marshfield, a suburb of Centerville. Here are your notes from tonight’s meeting:

-Board begins meeting by awarding the district’s “Teacher of the Year” honor to Evelyn Hansen, a math teacher at Dawson High School. Hansen “has made subjects like trigonometry and calculus interesting, understandable and even exciting to students for more than 25 years,” says board President Irving Kroning as he hands Hansen a plaque. The award is based on polling of teachers and students district-wide.  

-Board hears a report from Jason Freedman, principal of the Allgren Middle School. He says construction on the new addition to the school is going well and should be completed by the target date of next July, in time for the fall semester. The addition consists of a computer lab and two classrooms. The project has been budgeted at $850,000; Freedberg says he doesn’t expect any cost overruns.

-Board hears public testimony from the group Parents for the Christian Way, which wants to ban more than a dozen books from the district’s high school libraries, including “Catcher in the Rye,” “The Color Purple” and “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” The group presents the board with a petition bearing 5,000 signatures asking that the books be banned. “These books are filled with filth, depravity and godlessness,” group President Grace Shanker tells the board. “They have no place in our children’s schools, even the high schools.” Shanker’s comments get scattered applause and some boos from the audience of about 100 people. In a public comment session that follows, more than a dozen people speak, some in support of the measure, others opposed. Sarah Vopat, an English teacher at Centerville State College, tells the board, “Many of these books are examples of classic American literature. Banning them would be a disgrace. This religious group might have you believe otherwise, but censorship is not the American way.” Vopat, like Shanker, gets a mix of applause and boos. The board, after hearing public comment for more than an hour, votes to take the matter under advisement.

When you get back to the newsroom, the city editor tells you to get some background information from the Internet about other attempts around the country to ban books in schools, and to include that in your story.