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Santa Barbara, California
Always Running, a popular book about life in a street gang by reformed Los Angeles gangbanger and heroin user Luis Rodriguez, was pulled from Santa Barbara schools in mid-November after a parent complained about graphic passages depicting violence and sex. Parent Anne Aziz-Cutner wrote the Santa Barbara Unified School District after learning the book was required reading for her Dos Pueblos High School tenth-grader.
"The book . . . contains detailed descriptions of oral sexual acts and fornication . . . and the rape of twelve- to fourteen-year-old girls," she wrote. "What exactly are you teaching our children?"
In 1999, Always Running was among the American Libraiy Association's list often most-censored books in the United States. School districts in Fremont, Santa Rosa and San Jose, California, as well as districts in Illinois and Texas, have also banned the book.
"The reason why kids like the book is they don't see their lives in any of the other books presented to them," Rodriguez said. "They're looking for literature that has some meaning in their lives, and when they don't have that, they usually don't want to read."
"We've pulled the book districtwide," said Santa Barbara's interim Superintendent Brian Sarvis. "It's not an appropriate book to assign to students, and the teacher agrees." Reported in: FirstAmendmentCenter.org, November 12.
Boulder, Colorado
Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" is a hard-hitting, anti-war song produced more than twenty years before any current Boulder High School student was born. More than forty years after its release, the song was resurrected at Boulder High with huge and confusing repercussions that prompted secret Service agents to pay the campus a visit.
Some students and parents apparently let the secret Service and talk-radio stations know they were unhappy with the plan of a trio of students to do a poetry reading of the song, accompanied by background music, according to Ron Cabrera, the school's principal. Rumors were rampant that during an audition and rehearsal for the talent show, the students changed Dylan's powerful last verse at the end of the song to say that they hoped President Bush was going to die.
secret Service agents interviewed Cabrera to determine what all the uproar was about and whether any threats were being made...