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Litchfield Teacher Resigns After Curriculum Complaints
By Phil Sletten on Friday, June 26, 2009.
A controversy over reading material at Campbell High School in Litchfield may have led a teacher to resign this week.
The move came after some parents complained about the appropriateness of some short stories in an elective English class at the school.
NHPR’s Phil Sletten has more.
Kathleen Reilly was the English Department curriculum coordinator at Campbell High.
She had been a teacher at the school since it opened in 2000.
But she turned in her resignation letter recently
to Litchfield school district superintendent Doctor Elaine Cutler.
Cutler refused to say why Reilly resigned, but that it was unfortunate that she did.
“Certainly we have worked diligently to try to convince her to continue her career at Campbell High School.”
Reilly is responsible for approving all English Curriculum at Campbell High school.
But the controversy came up over reading material in an elective Short Stories class focused on gender love and family.
Sue Ann Johnson, a parent one of the students in the class, originally raised the complaint.
She spoke out at a recent school board meeting.
“We are desensitizing our children to violence. We are desensitizing them to sex. We are desensitizing them to drug use.”
She took issue with four stories.
Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” chronicles a couple’s veiled discussion of abortion.
And a short story by Stephen King depicts cannibalism.
But two other tales were the most troubling to parents.
They were satirist author David Sedaris’s “I Like Guys,” in which he discovers his homosexuality.
And Laura Lippman’s “The Crack Cocaine Diet” which describes oral sex, drug abuse and murder.
Upon hearing the complaints, the Campbell High school principal and superintendent agreed to pull the stories from the curriculum.
The Litchfield school board held a public meeting on the issue Wednesday night.
A large majority spoke generally against the district’s decision to remove the literature
They called the district’s decision censorship.
Litchfield state representative Laura Gandia disagreed.
“This is not about censorship at all. This is about what is appropriate in an educational school setting.”
Over half the speakers were students or recent alumni.
Andrew Chauluk graduated two weeks ago and
voiced strong support for the English teachers.
“It’s not about what’s in the story. It’s the discussion that follows. I know when we come in a circle with twenty-two kids in our AP English class, for an hour we’re delving into the themes, the plots, everything that has to do with the story.”
Emilia DiCola, who graduated last year, warned of a slippery slope.
“Who’s to say that a parent who is racist can’t come in and say ‘I don’t like To Kill A Mockingbird, let’s ban To Kill A Mockingbird.’”
Some residents also expressed concern that outside groups were interfering in the Litchfield debate.
After over an hour of public comment, the school board decided to form a permanent committee to oversee the school curriculum in future, and to make course material clearer to parents.
Superintendent Elaine Cutler said that while “The Crack Cocaine Diet” probably was over the top, she was not yet convinced the other stories were inappropriate for the class.
Cutler presented Kathleen Reilly’s resignation at the end of the meeting.
Students say a lot of people are going to miss her.
For NHPR News, I’m Phil Sletten.
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I 100% agree that the curriculum was inappropriate for high school students. Her resignation may have been an over-reaction unless she felt that her content selections were just--then her resignation is justified.
I applaud the parents for getting involved and stopping this nonsense. I am perplexed why the school administration did not have polices to proactively stop this.
I suppose one could try to protect a son or daughter in their senior year about these topics and then let them loose to experience them on their own a year later. My preference for my boys was to let them experience these controversial issues in the high school classroom where they could safely discuss them theoretically and hear what their teacher and classmates had to say before they went to college.
Of course, we also discussed these things at home, so they knew how we felt, how we lived and how we approached these difficult issues in the course of our lives.
We depended on family, church and our intellect and expect our boys to do the same. We had no need to censor a teacher or school system to teach our boys about life.
They are now 24 and 25 and doing very well in this economically difficult and often morally confusing world.
The senior teacher should keep her job and the dissenting parents should quit the system and home school their children if they need to shelter them.
Joanne H. Gutt
Concord, NH
This is a perfect example of how schools have dumbed down education. One of the many reasons we opted for a private school education for our children. A school where they read the classics from F. Scott Fitgerald, Hemmingway, Irving, MacBeth, Dickens to name a few. The students of Litchfield were subjected to a Jerry Springer reading list. Parents should be beating down the doors demanded quality reading material, not garbage you read in Hustler and Penthouse!