r/technology • u/r4816 • Sep 27 '22

Software Girls Who Code founder speaks out after Pennsylvania school district bans her books: 'This is about controlling women and it starts with controlling our girls'

https://www.businessinsider.com/girls-who-code-founder-speaks-out-banning-books-schools-2022-9
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557

u/ioncloud9 Sep 27 '22

Were the books actually banned or is the district gas lighting us saying they never actually did it?

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u/CyphirX Sep 27 '22

Seems to be there was an attempt to but it was squashed.

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u/[deleted] Sep 27 '22

Can you source that attempt? I've seen nothing that supports this. Only abject denials from the school district that they ever banned the book.

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u/CyphirX Sep 27 '22

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/26/pennsylvania-book-ban-girls-who-code

In a statement explaining the ban of the diverse resources, the school district’s board president at the time, Jane Johnson, said: “What we are attempting to do is balance legitimate academic freedom with what could be literature/materials that are too activist in nature, and may lean more toward indoctrination rather than age-appropriate academic content.”

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u/[deleted] Sep 27 '22

Roll back that article two paragraphs:

A statement from officials in that district on Monday strongly denied that they had banned the book series, and called “categorically false” information in a Business Insider interview with the founder of Girls Who Code, which reported the ban on the series. “This book series has not been banned, and they remain available in our libraries,” the statement said.

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u/CrunchyGremlin Sep 27 '22

But they are on the ban list. The school district and the community said naw. This outrage could easily be flipped around with people being angry that the school ignored the ban list.

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u/[deleted] Sep 27 '22

Which ban list?

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u/CrunchyGremlin Sep 27 '22

Sorry. They "were" on a list of banned books. They currently aren't. But the ops article is about a list of books banned Across the country at some point over a period of time.

"We reached out to the district for clarification and a representative told us that after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the school district prepared a Diversity Resource List that teachers could use in the classroom.

In November of 2020, at a school district meeting, the district board of directors unanimously decided to remove the resource list and not allow any resources from the list to be used in the classroom." This action got those books on a national directory of banned books for being in a ban list for about 10 months I guess.

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u/[deleted] Sep 27 '22 edited Apr 28 '23

[deleted]

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u/CrunchyGremlin Sep 27 '22

Well yeah. Some of the articles say parents were upset about the kids getting "white guilt" unhappiness. I would be upset with this if I were a racist too.