BROOKFIELD, CT — At a special meeting Tuesday, the Brookfield Board of Education voted to keep a controversial graphic memoir on school library shelves.
The Board voted 4-3 to reject an appeal by some parents and keep “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” by Alison Bechdel, in circulation at the library.
The 2006 memoir is an exploration of the author’s relationship with her father, and her coming to terms with her own lesbian identity. The book presents as a graphic novel and uses literature to explore themes of suicide, sexual orientation, gender roles, and emotional abuse set against the backdrop of a dysfunctional family life.
It is the third controversial book that Brookfield parents have unsuccessfully tried to remove from circulation in the school.
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The e-book “This Book is Gay,” by Juno Dawson, was challenged by parents, and ultimately accepted by the BOE, with a 5-2 vote last July. The presence of “Drama,” a graphic novel by Raina Telgemeier, in the school library was debated by the Board in 2021, before it, too, was embraced.
In February 2022, Brookfield Public Schools approved an addendum that “recognizes the right of an individual parent/guardian to request that his/her child’s library selection be limited,” but also states that residents do not have the right to determine library materials for students other than their own.
About 60 people attended the meeting, held in the Brookfield High School Media Center, and around 60 people emailed the BOE on the matter. About 60 percent of the those were in favor of keeping the book available in the school library, according to board chair Wendy Youngblood.
Speaking during the public comment, former vice chair of the Board of Education Ron Jaffe said he was opposed to removing the book from school circulation, noting that The New York Times “called it a masterpiece” and Kirkus Reviews tapped it as “one of the best graphic novels ever.”
Resident Tony Bosco-Schmidt said he was an actor who recently played the role of the father in a stage production of “Fun Home” at the Brookfield Theatre of the Arts. He called an attempt to remove the book from the library “a grave mistake and a violation of the principles of academic freedom, intellectual diversity, and artistic expression.”
“When government gets in the way of parents, we have lost our society,” Rocky Road resident Robert Guarino argued. He suggested that “regulation around explicit material in the school system” be made a referendum on the 2024 ballot. “Why are we the only ones making this decision?”
Rosa Fernandes, vice chair of the BOE, responded to Guarino later in the evening, saying “50 people are not making the decision, seven are,” and, “you’ll never see something like this on a ballot because we live in a representative democracy.”
“These book challengers are borne of a radically conservative political agenda that uses fear and conspiracies to accomplish their goals,” Fernandes said. She challenged the “hypocrisy” of the book challengers, saying that “the honest fact of the matter is that, on the whole, parents are not actually concerned with the age appropriateness or sexual nature of material their child has full unencumbered access to, because if they did, then I wouldn’t see every high schooler out there glued to their screens.”
Kevin Placella, a Heatherwood Drive resident disagreed, calling the book “sexually explicit in nature.” He said it was “up to parents in the home if they want their children to look at something that might help them or issues that they’re facing.
Deer Run Road resident Shannon Riley said her concerns were not about any particular book, but about trusting the curators.
“The issue is that the complainants are undermining the expertise of professionals who have made it their life’s work to educate themselves on the content and curation of a library that services a diverse group of young people,” Riley said.
It was a sentiment echoed by Debbie Brooks of Crestview Drive. She identified herself as a librarian, and said “that a certain amount of discomfort doesn’t give a person the right to alter the choices that others make.”
Neither was the matter just about “Fun Home” to Tower Road resident Sara Coffey. Instead, “It’s about an inconsistent set of standards that provide no expectation or guidelines about what can and cannot be shown to our children or can and cannot be spoken to our children inside the school walls.” Talk of sexuality has already “bled its way into the school day. It’s been discussed far more than should be allowed in a school setting,” she said.
Laura Orban of Stony Hill Road called the book challenges “targeted hate” aimed at the LGBTQ+ community, and said “we should shut them down. The cost is too high.”
Elena Lopez of Summer Pasture Lane rejected that premise: “The people who speak against content like ‘Fun Home’ being in a public school are unfairly painted as bigots who are trying to persecute LGBTQ children.” She said it’s the “adults who insist that LGBTQ children must have access to sexually charged materials while they are in school and should be focusing on academics [who are] the adults of great concern.”
Austin Monteiro, of Dairy Farm Drive, called many of the arguments made in defense of keeping the book in the school library a “regurgitation” of the American Library Association’s handbook. Today’s ALA, Monteiro said, “opposes all attempts to restrict access to library service materials and facilities based on the age of library users. So again, this is not our parents’ American Library Association.”
Following the public comment portion of the meeting, BOE member Robert Fischetto introduced visual aids to the discussion. He taped copies of some of the explicit artwork from the challenged book to a white board in the room while describing the pictures, in context.
In her blistering critique of “Fun Home,” board member Joy Greenstein took to the podium to emphasize that, “This book celebrates and promotes criminal behavior… The father is a high school English teacher who sleeps with his male students and supplies them with alcohol.”
But to BOE secretary Stephanie Sikora, the removal of the book from the library would be “telling an entire group of people who are already marginalized that they do not matter, that they don’t have a place here. Despite what some people have said, this is an attack on LGBTQ+ themes hidden under the guise of claims that it is inappropriate due to subject matter.”
In the final reckoning, BOE chair Wendy Youngblood, vice chair Rosa Fernandes, secretary Stephanie Sikora and board member Hala Hourani voted to keep “Fun Home” on the shelves. Board members Joy Greenstein, Robert Fischetto, and Sarah Devine voted to remove the book from circulation in the Brookfield Public Schools.
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