Before her current role as organizer and board member of Forsyth Coalition for Education, an organization that has successfully reversed a book ban despite having existed for less than a year, the biggest book controversy Pat Wall contended with in Forsyth County revolved around Harry Potter, Goosebumps, and Captain Underpants. Before retiring from her thirty-plus years as a media specialist, Wall had worked for four of them in a Forsyth County elementary school, where ultimately parents’ concern over the books their children read was secondary to the satisfaction they took from their children reading at all. 

Fast forward to March of this year, to a woman so hysterical over a sex scene in a middle school library book, that a Forsyth Board of Education meeting had to be shut down, the attendees made to disperse, with the remaining speakers forced to re-enter the room one at a time, in order to make their comments to the board. The woman, Alison Hair, had been instructed at the previous BOE meeting not to read explicit passages out loud, when she read the word “blow job” from a passage taken from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a novel about a child whose father was killed on September 11th. 

Wall says these histrionics are par for the course with Hair and her group, the Mama Bears, who are now suing the Forsyth Board of Education for violating Hair’s first amendment rights during the meeting. According to Wall, the group of “ultraconservative, pseudo-Christian evangelicals” have caught onto a wave of national fervor, in staunch opposition to school library books containing sexual content, descriptions of gender, and anything about the LGBTQ or Black experience. Wall describes it as the next trending protest for a group that previously condemned CRT, masks in schools, and whose members made a flyer likening social and emotional learning practices to the occult. 

The Mama Bears, along with a group which calls themselves Concerned Parents of Forsyth County, were responsible for the sudden removal of eight books from school library shelves in January, the event Wall calls “the catalyst” for the creation of FC4Ed. What alarmed her was not only the books being removed, but the complete disregard of the existing protocol for challenging books, which had long been established by the Department of Education before the passage of SB 226, which by comparison is barely a process at all.

Prior to Governor Kemp signing SB 226 into law, requiring schools to either affirm or deny a parent’s book challenge within seven days of the request (10 if the parent agrees to an extension), removing a book from a school library required a more thorough process. According to Wall, it involved a parent notifying the school media specialist of their issue, after which the media specialist would alert the school’s administration. From there, a media committee would be formed with the media specialist, an administrator, a group of teachers, sometimes a parent, and in high schools, sometimes a student.   

SB 226 offers little time to gather a committee in which all of its members are able to commit to reading an entire book, and provides even less time afterwards for meaningful discussion of a book’s flaws and its merits. 

Back in January, even before SB 266, the Mama Bears and Concerned Parents of Forsyth “circumvented” the school altogether, according to Wall, approaching Superintendent Jeff Bearden directly, who immediately acquiesced to their demand to remove eight books. 

A member of FC4Ed who is currently a media specialist, found out about the removal via e-mail, after the decision was already made. The media specialist informed Wall and other education professionals of the unprecedented move by the county, and the friends set out to combat this ban with their combined experience, passion for learning, and disinformation tactics. 

Because many of the parents do not actually read the books they are working so hard to get rid of, according to Wall, they miss the potential value of the book to their children’s lives. In an effort to illuminate their greater significance, Wall and fellow FC4Ed organizers each took turns during the three minutes allotted to them for public comment, during BOE meetings, to each give essentially an elevated book report on each of the books. 

In addition to sharing a more complete story, examining a book’s content in an open forum aids the public understanding of why certain age groups are interested in certain books, recognizing the importance of acknowledging different maturity levels in students.

Wall discusses the book she presented to the BOE, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult.

“The theme is about a school shooting, but there is a love scene in there between a teenage couple. The book is rather long- it’s 455 pages, and there were nine sentences in the book that thad to do with teenage sex. But that was one of the [books] they demanded be removed. It’s a book that a high schooler might read- it’s not something a middle schooler is going to pick up. [The Mama Bears along with the Concerned Parents of Forsyth] keep referring to students, whether they’re eighteen or six, as children, and that’s very intentional. One of their favorite words is grooming- that we are all grooming these kids either to be sexually active, or to suddenly turn gay. One of them called one of the Board members a pedophile.” 

Conversely, FC4Ed has made great strides in their relationship with the Forsyth BOE. In addition to their book presentations, Wall and her fellow group members have been taking an educational approach during their public comments, with short and informative “Did You Know” series, such as one Wall presented on the 1982 Supreme Court case Island Trees School District v. Pico, which prioritized students’ first amendment rights to read books above any entity’s critique over the book’s content.   

Shortly after Wall’s presentation, Superintendent Bearden contacted her, and requested an audience with FC4Ed, during which he promised to never again allow an arbitrary book ban to take place, and in a good faith effort over the summer, formed a committee of sixty people to review the banned books. Mike Evans, Dr. Bearden’s Director of Technology and Media, reached out to media specialists, including Wall, as well as teachers, to ask for names of parents who might be interested. 

Following feedback from the committee, all but one of the books were approved to be reinstated. The book which will remain off the shelves is All Boys Aren’t Blue, a multi-award-winning memoir about a boy’s experience growing up Black and Queer.

While Wall bemoans the removal of All Boys Aren’t Blue due to its intersecting topic of racial and gender identity, which she refers to as a “double whammy” for extremists who subscribe to whiteness and heterosexuality as the norm, she is heartened that the books were at least put through a review process.

Wall remains hopeful that in September, when the Department of Education incorporates SB 226 into existing policy, that some tenets of the former policy will remain in the new model, and to keep the complaints localized, which she says is critical for equal access.

“That’s not what [extremists] want,” however, Wall says, ‘they want to remove the books totally. And if a challenge is successful in one school, they want it to apply to all the schools.”

Wall maintains that the extremists are a loud minority, and that most parents want their children to receive a full education, which includes reading for pleasure. 

Wall says this is especially critical for middle schoolers, when many students stop reading unless it is required, with boys tending to stop earlier, just after fifth grade. As a media specialist at one middle school for ten years, Wall and her colleagues implemented a program in which students could request for the library to purchase almost any book they wanted, after which it would go through a minimal review process.  

Wall admits that some of the books were admittedly more “forward thinking,” and that they perhaps pushed the boundaries a bit, but their library had a huge circulation and fifty students lined up every morning to check out books before school even started. 

Along with Wall’s experience, FC4Ed’s board consists of educators with advanced degrees, two of them in literature, as well as a student in Duke University, all of whom are passionate about education, and continuing in their efforts toward its expansion, rather than its extinction.