BEAUFORT COUNTY, SC () – A battle between one Beaufort County woman and people all over South Carolina about book banning in schools is heating up.
In 2024, South Carolina implemented a new rule that permits individuals to make appeals to the State Board of Education if their requests to ban certain books in schools are initially denied by local authorities.
Currently, a woman who had previously proposed the removal of over 90 books from public schools in 2022 is taking advantage of this new policy to re-submit her request, and she is experiencing success.
“In the autumn of 2022, we faced two individuals who contested 97 books in our Beaufort County public schools. One person disputed 96 books, while the other challenged one,” Mary Foster, a Board Member with Families Against Book Bans, explained.
At the time, the book review process was confined to the local level.
“The district had a method to follow, to review books, and basically, they had review committees for each book. The committees were comprised of a librarian, a school administrator, a district employee, a teacher, and community members,” Foster said.
Under that process, only five books were removed from Beaufort County Schools.
2024 is when the new rule went into effect.
“A policy was proposed by the State Board of Education, and, ultimately, a regulation was passed that allowed books to be banned statewide,” Foster said.
Under the newly adopted statute, anything containing “depictions of sexual conduct” was no longer allowed, no matter the context.
Suddenly, the person who had challenged 96 books was now granted a path to submit appeals for the 91 that were still on shelves, and she’s already done so with more than 30.
“Twentyish of those books, Beaufort County said we’ve already reviewed these and passed them on to the state, and, unfortunately, the state decided to ban most of them,” Foster said. “But then there were fifteen more books, five that were challenged in March, five in April, five in May that came from that original list of 96. Beaufort county presumably did the same thing, but the state school board said y’all have to take some action.”
Foster said the State School Board has mandated that the Beaufort County School Board rule on the remaining fifteen submissions locally before passing them on to the state. It is unclear when they will rule on the resubmitted books or if they will stand by their original decision.
“We have opt-out forms. So, if you don’t want your child to read that book, you have every right,” Foster said. “The concern is that we now have a very small part of the population saying that they know what’s best for all students to have access to, and that is the problem.”
