The majority of all school book challenges in the United States came from just 11 people. Meet Jennifer Petersen.
Jennifer Petersen holds a stack of books that she has read, flagged for sexual content and challenged in Spotsylvania County Public Schools. She ordered most from Amazon. In the last year, she read each one. She highlighted and typed up excerpts from more than 1,300 pages - of the 24,000-plus pages she read - that she says depict sexual acts.
Petersen’s district has lurched from one book controversy to another in recent years. In 2021, the Spotsylvania school board voted to remove sexually explicit tomes from libraries, with two members suggesting burning them - remarks that drew national scorn. The board later rescinded that decision. Then, this spring, the superintendent pulled 14 books for “sexually explicit material” - including Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” - and suggested shutting down school libraries to address budget shortfalls.
But to others, including some of the district’s top leaders, she is a hero. The superintendent, Mark Taylor, wrote in a statement that Petersen has “raised awareness” of sexually explicit content in his libraries. And at least a dozen Spotsylvania parents and area residents, spanning different ethnicities and religions, have coalesced around Petersen as their champion. They note that she is Buddhist, not the Christian fundamentalist some assume.
But the job was far from done. She walked to her living room and nodded to a low-slung, brown sofa. That, she said, is where she does her book reviewing. Petersen walked closer and pointed with an index finger to a concave, dark spot on the couch, about the size of someone sitting cross-legged. Peterson didn’t think about what books were available in schools until two years ago. She had begun attending school board meetings in 2020, first to protest pandemic school closures and then mandatory masking.
“It was like, ‘Oh, wait, the ALA has a list of banned books.’ ‘So PEN America keeps a list,’” Petersen said. “It was pretty easy, between social media, regular news media and professional organizations,” to find her targets. As has become her regular practice, Petersen speaks during the public comment section of the Spotsylvania school board meeting. At a school board meeting on Jan. 9 of this year, 52 book challenges in, Petersen walked to the podium and started reading aloud from “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” a book about three high school friends, one of whom has leukemia. Petersen had filed an objection to the book two months earlier for graphic, inappropriate content.
To Petersen, it was a moment of triumph: School board members’ discomfort was proof the books should not be in school libraries, she felt. Kimberly Allen, library liaison and high school librarian for the district, estimates that, last school year, fielding Petersen’s challenges required 4o hours of labor per week from her and a team of 10 high school librarians, work they mostly did on their own time, late in the evening and on weekends, because they still had to keep up with their regular jobs. Neither she nor her colleagues received overtime pay, Allen said.
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