Parents Wary of School Library Selections

Parents in Miami are fighting to remove a book that paints Fidel Castro's Cuba in a favorable light — just one example of how public school libraries have become battlefields on which parents must fight to keep their kids from being indoctrinated with liberal values.





Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values, said kids' moral lives are what's at stake in the battle.





"Everything is at risk here," he said, "School systems are allowed to teach our children and promote books to very much turn on the values that they were taught at home."





Parents who wish to control their children's reading material are often labeled 'censors.' But Burress said they don't have to take that label lying down.





"Someone is choosing what books will go in the library and what books will not," he told Family News in Focus. "That by definition is a censor. For someone to object to a book that has been chosen to be put into a library is free speech."





Candi Cushman, educational analyst for Focus on the Family Action, said there's plenty a parent can do, including serving on a book-selection committee.





"Parents have a right to lobby to be on those committees," she explained. "Go to your school board and ask for a committee to be set up, if it's not, and then ask to be included in that committee."





FOR MORE INFORMATION You can find a list of titles to be aware of on the Parents Against Bad Books In Schools Web site.