By Jim Brown
August 1, 2003

(AgapePress) - One California parent is refusing to abandon her campaign to have sexually explicit books removed from classrooms in her school district. Pamela LaChappell has been calling on the Modesto City School Board to drop the offensive literature from its required reading list.

For months now, LaChappell has been warning parents, grandparents, and taxpayers in Modesto that some of the literature being used in the city schools' advanced English classes is sexually explicit and so offensive as to be considered X-rated. She has taken her concerns to the school board, which so far has refused to drop books containing graphic details of child rape, incest, and necrophilia. Instead, the board has released an annotated list providing brief summaries of each required reading selection.

LaChappell is dissatisfied. "The lip service is that the school board wants parents to know what's in these books," she says. However, the California parent believes the real message the administration is sending, albeit in a whisper, is that they want parents to know as little as possible.

"When you look at the list and the cover letter, you really do get the impression that the administration is doing what they can to keep parents placated and to lure them into a false security," Lachappell says.

Two of the works in question are novelist Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits and David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars. Since LaChappell went public with her concerns, several students have opted out of reading one of the controversial books.

LaChappell is concerned with making other parents and citizens in her community aware of the explicit literature, but she does not want the issue to end there. "Although these books are assigned in our Modesto school system, we are learning that they are assigned all across the country," she says.

LaChappell says she has learned that the reading list is based on recommendations from the International Baccalaureate Program, an educational program out of Sweden, which was designed to provide a challenging curriculum for gifted students.

LaChappell has three children in college and a fifth-grader that she is home-schooling. Earlier this year in a Modesto Bee newspaper article, she noted that many parents operate under the mistaken assumption that their children's schools are teaching wholesome literature.

© 2003 AgapePress all rights reserved.

E-mail this page to a friend

Printer-Friendly Version

Read all of our current headlines