Beaufort County students lost access to 97 books — they want them back
By Sara Gregory
sgregory@postandcourier.com
BEAUFORT
Madelyn Confare was in her AP English Literature class the first time she heard about the 97 books some adults wanted out of her school district’s libraries.
Her classmates at Beaufort High School passed around the list, pointing out ones they had each read. Many saw favorites cataloged, books they gushed over and couldn’t stop talking about. One of them, Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” was assigned reading in another class. Confare was outraged but also baffled. Why remove books that students want to read?
Confare is a bookworm. Two tall shelves in her bedroom are filled, and they don’t even hold all her books. But for most of her 17 years, reading has simply been a pleasant hobby, a way to disappear into fantasy worlds and learn about people whose lives are nothing like her own.
Then, two adults made a list of books that touched on issues of race, gender and sexual identity, books that dealt with those topics in ways the grown-ups felt weren’t appropriate for students, and they petitioned district officials to pull them from Confare’s school library.
The senior now finds herself part of a band of Beaufort teenagers who are indignant over the adults’ efforts to keep books out of their hands. They’ve become fixtures at school board meetings, patiently waiting their turn for three minutes at the microphone to plead for their right to read.
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