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School system's decision to censor Diary of Anne Frank prompts discussion in Culpeper. Date published: 1/29/2010
By Rhonda Simmons
Culpeper Star-Exponent Citing sexual passages that might be inappropriate for classroom discussion, Superintendent Bobbi Johnson is defending Culpeper County Public Schools' decision to censor the unedited version of Anne Frank's diary. ''The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition" details a Jewish teenager's two-year experience hiding from Nazis in a confined attic during World War II. A CCPS book review committee recently chose to pull the 340-page diary from its shelves because 13-year-old Frank writes about her vagina. ''The essence of the story, the struggle of a young girl faced with horrible atrocities, is not lost by editing the few pages that speak to adolescent discovery of intimate feelings," Johnson wrote in an e-mail to the Star-Exponent Thursday. "While these pages could be the basis of a relevant discussion, they do not reflect the purpose of studying the book at the middle-school level and could foster a discussion in a classroom that many would find inappropriate." The move has brought considerable backlash from the community, and people across Virginia read about the story when it ran Thursday on the Associated Press wire. In Culpeper, the book is usually assigned in the fall to eighth-graders in English class. The original version, released by Frank's father, Otto Frank, in 1947 omitted about 30 percent of her most intimate thoughts featuring sexual references and criticisms about her mother and others living in the "Secret Annex." But during the 50th anniversary of Frank's death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, the Anne Frank Foundation published the original, unedited version in 1995. Frank's diary, which she received on her 13th birthday, reveals her personal story of brutality that Holocaust victims experienced during the German occupation of the Netherlands from July 1942 until her arrest in August 1944. Before the story broke Wednesday, Culpeper County School Board Chairman George Dasher said he was unaware of the decision to pull the book. On Thursday, school board member Bob Beard also said he found out about it by reading the Star-Exponent. According to the school division's "public complaints about learning resources" policy, censorship decisions do not have to be approved by the school board. The CCPS policy states that a review committee -- consisting of the school's principal, librarian, teacher, complainant, parent and/or student -- must gather to discuss the matter.
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