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Assassination Classroom Manga Removed From Florida, Wisconsin School Libraries
posted on by Joanna Cayanan & Egan Loo
In the Assassination Classroom manga and its adaptations, a class of middle school students are tasked to assassinate their homeroom teacher (who is really an alien with superpowers) before it destroys Earth at the end of the school year.
Gifford Middle School removed three books from the series, which has illustrations of students with guns in a classroom from its library. According to Jennifer Pippin, chair of the Indian River County chapter of Moms for Liberty, the books were inappropriate, considering the recent school shootings in the US. Pippin added, "We don't want students to think it's OK to kill their teachers."
Another group from Florida, the Citizens Defending Freedom organization announced on Monday that it will challenge the manga, which can be found in Florida middle schools for its violent and sexually explicit content. The organization's National Communications Director Kristen Huber stated, "We should all be able to agree that violence toward teachers and explicit sexual content is not something that schools should be glorifying or promoting, especially on taxpayer dollars."
Florida's HB 1467 bill went into effect last July, and it requires school libraries to only include books pre-approved or vetted by a holder of "a valid educational media specialist certificate" from Florida's Department of Education.
The Elmbrook School District in southeastern Wisconsin added five books from the series in its e-library starting with the 2021-2022 school year, but removed it last month after a parent raised concerns that the district might be promoting gun violence against teachers with the series. Elmbrook's Director of Library Services Kay Koepsel-Benning said the claim is "inaccurate." Another parent raised concerns about the depiction of violence and the sexualization of minors in the series.
The series is also challenged in Pender County in North Carolina, where it was described as a work that educates students on how to kill their teachers.
In Richmond, Virginia, House Bill 1379, which requires school principals to keep a catalog of all audiovisual content, and keep track of which books contain sexually explicit content in the school's library, and make those information available to parents, passed the House of Delegates in February, and was up for debate in Senate subcommittees. Delegate Tim Anderson, who sponsored the bill cited the Assassination Classroom manga, and said he took issue that the series is available in some school libraries.
Another Weekly Shonen Jump manga, Death Note, faced similar complaints in the 2000s and 2010s. The American Library Association's Young Adult Library Services Association named the manga among its "2007 Top Ten Great Graphic Novels for Teens," and the ALA cited the manga in its Banned Books Week 2010 campaign to raise public awareness of such challenges.
Update: Virginia's House Bill 1379 did not pass the Senate in March. Source: Rappahannock News
Sources: USA Today via Siliconera, Fox 13, Fox News (link 2), Port City Daily, 6 News Richmond, CNN
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