According to a February memo meant to clarify the regulation, descriptions of sexual conduct might include language with enough “explanatory detail” to form “a mental image of the conduct occurring.”
“I don’t know about you, but that sounds really subjective, and I … don’t think our librarians know how to apply that,” Kennedy said.
The superintendent’s March memo, which echoed Trump administration anti-diversity policies, meanwhile, called for the suppression of ideas to “positively indoctrinate students with the political administration’s views on sex, gender, race, and American exceptionalism.”
This, too, is a violation of Constitutional rights, the lawsuit contends.
Student complaints
A student from a public school in Charleston County, as well as two siblings who attend Greenville High School, are listed as plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
The Charleston student — who attends Academic Magnet High School — is a member of the Diversity Awareness Youth Literacy Organization.
According to the lawsuit, before passage of the regulation, he was able to borrow books from his teacher’s classroom collection. That ended when the regulation required all educators — teachers and librarians — to catalog all their books. Many teachers stopped providing classroom libraries altogether, the lawsuit said.
Two students at Greenville High also were members of DAYLO, according to the lawsuit, and wanted to read “Perks of Being a Wallflower” — a book banned by the state school board. They said they would bring their own copies to school but were blocked from doing so, according to the lawsuit.
“By mandating the removal of all materials that describe sexual conduct from the classroom and the library, the Regulation undermines the Plaintiffs education,” the lawsuit concludes.
Education Lab reporter Valerie Nava contributed to this story.