In a victory for the freedom to read, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian has been restored to the 10th grade curriculum at Alton High School in Alton, Illinois. The book was temporarily suspended pending a…
Tag: illinois
CBLDF Joins Defense of Absolutely True Diary in Illinois School District
For at least the fifth time this year, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian has been challenged as part of a public school curriculum. This time it’s at Alton High School in Alton, Illinois, and CBLDF…
Bradbury Biographer Warns of Dystopian Future Without School Librarians
Few would disagree that in the current context of rampant misinformation, students in public schools must be trained to seek out reliable facts and assess sources. Nevertheless, every year more and more school librarians–the professionals who teach those exact skills–are…
Parent Group Demands Changes or Cancellation for Illinois High School’s Civil Rights Seminar Day
Some parents in the northern suburbs of Chicago are complaining that an innovative all-day seminar on civil rights at New Trier High School will be “biased, unbalanced, [and] divisive.” Award-winning authors Andrew Aydin and Colson Whitehead are scheduled to speak…
Illinois High School Discontinues God of Small Things, Cites Lack of Initial Approval
A Chicago-area high school has discontinued use of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things in its English curriculum, saying that the novel had not gone through the initial approval process outlined in district policy and contained “subject matter in…
Illinois Enacts Law to Protect Student Journalists Rights
Dapier Receives Intellectual Freedom Award for Persepolis Research
Jarrett Dapier, the library science scholar whose Freedom of Information Act Request helped to uncover the truth about Chicago Public Schools administrators’ 2013 effort to ban Persepolis from classrooms and libraries, is receiving some well-earned recognition from the American Library…
Chicago School Librarian’s Job Saved by Student Protest, Anonymous Donation
Score another win for student activists in Chicago Public Schools, who last week helped to avert the dismissal of their beloved librarian due to budget cuts. Sara Sayigh, librarian at the South Side’s DuSable Campus, had been slated to lose…
CBLDF Signs on to Protest Illinois Ban of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
CBLDF today joined with other organizational members of the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Kids’ Right to Read Project in sending a letter of protest to the principal of Mattoon High School in Mattoon, IL, who ignored school district policy to…
High School Reading Assignments Challenged in Illinois, New Jersey
Banned Books Week is barely over, but book challenges continue around the country! Today we got word that Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was pulled from a high school English class in Mattoon, Illinois before students could…