A southwestern Michigan school board has come under fire for its efforts to ban books from libraries and classrooms.
After its most recent election cycle, the Brandywine school board went from a liberal majority to a conservative majority. The four newest board members were all backed by We The Parents, a conservative "parental rights" group that receives funding from right-wing political action committee the 1776 Project.
The reconfigured board immediately moved to ban books with topics such as LGBTQ+ identity and racism, and in February voted to block new books from coming into schools until they had undergone review. They also created an "Explicit Material Book Review Committee" to evaluate those already in schools.
The decisions have drawn outrage from the community and local activists, including Brandywine High School alumnus Diane Seuss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who won the 2022 award for her book "frank: sonnets". As an English professor at the University of Michigan and Washington University in St. Louis, Seuss wrote an open letter to the Brandywine board, urging them to think twice about banning books.
"The community is lucky to have such impressive human resources," she wrote. "I feel sadness and anger, then, that members of the school board are now jumping on the bandwagon of recent trends in bringing conservative religious and political dogma into educational decision-making."
Seuss said that the book bans "represent a lack of understanding of the purpose and power of education," as well as create "a lack of trust in educated and experienced teachers, librarians, and administrators."
The writer shared that her mother had also been an English teacher in Brandywine until her retirement, and that it was encouragement from teachers like her mother that led to her success as an author.
"I don’t believe any of my accomplishments would have happened without my time at Brandywine. Books were freely available in the library. Challenging books. Even controversial books," Seuss continued, adding, "[Through them], I learned empathy, and the price one can pay for having a controversial point of view. I gained confidence. I experienced excellence."
She concluded: "I urge the school board to think long and hard before turning Brandywine into a school system without freedom of thought and freedom of expression. You risk alienating hard-working professionals who are, in fact, experts in their fields. You risk shutting down the imaginations and intellectual adventurousness of the students."
