(Video: Fox News Digital)
After a Florida father’s interaction with a school board went viral over the seemingly all too common presence of pornographic material within school libraries, a receptive board member is demanding “disciplinary action.”
Ashley Gilhousen has served on the board of the Clay County School District since 2014 and was present when Bruce Friedman, the father of a 15-year-old son and president of Florida’s No Left Turn in Education, confronted them about the inappropriate content of books being made available to students in their libraries. Friedman had had his microphone silenced over Federal Communication Commission concerns when he attempted to read excerpts from the offending books, but Gilhousen, a parent herself, was sympathetic to the outrage.
“Now my task, as a school board member, is how do I address it and so that same school board meeting that went viral, later on in the meeting, as a board we adopted an emergency policy to address this issue,” she told Fox News Digital.
“There’s been a lot of denial,” Friedman had said. “The teachers are saying there’s no such thing as porn in our libraries and at the same time they’re creating a policy to quietly make it go away. Well, either it’s there or it’s not – by the lawyers stifling me, that’s an admission that it’s there.”
Florida school board cuts dad’s mic as he begins reading ‘pornography’ allegedly found in library https://t.co/wjeyyiYhZ1
— American Wire News (@americanwire_) July 12, 2022
Gilhousen looked into Friedman’s concerns and explained, “My own research in our school library so far I’ve identified 75 books that I’m working to challenge to get off of our shelves.”
The emergency measure taken by the board allows for books to get removed until they are appropriately reviewed as opposed to remaining available to the students until a challenge was completed.
“It’s not perfect and it’s still evolving because,” she explained, “we adopted it in a state of emergency because we have school starting August 10 and these books need to be out of our libraries before students are back in the classroom.”
“This policy creates a mechanism so that as soon as a book is challenged it’s removed from the shelf until it’s reviewed,” Gilhousen added.
Friedman had attempted to read an excerpt from “Lucky” by Alice Sebold that details the rape of a college girl. “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison, in which a boy recalls oral sex at ten years old was listed, as well as “Julián is a Mermaid” by Jessica Love, which is said to be an introduction to gender fluidity where a boy routinely strips to his underwear and eventually attends the NYC Mermaid Parade to express himself.
“We need to create a mechanism that spells out very plainly who is held accountable for the books that are on the shelves. And it obviously starts with the library media center specialists, but those purchases are then signed off by the principal who is then accountable to the superintendent,” she laid out, after explaining how some of these titles get added by the publishers as “bonus books,” particularly the “more politically driven agenda-type books.”
“There needs to be disciplinary action for anybody who offers this kind of material to a child,” Gilhousen stated and reiterated her own visceral response to seeing this type of content in the library. “I’m disgusted that anybody would think that that’s appropriate material to have in a school library. Immediately, my first phone call was to the person that oversees our curriculum and instruction and my first question was, ‘How in the world did this happen in Clay County?'”
“Honestly, to me, I don’t understand how anybody could make such an egregious mistake,” she went on.
“So for me, as a school board member, obviously that is alarming and then for me as a mom it’s unconscionable,” Gilhousen expressed.
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Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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