It has been a turbulent week for me and Baylee! We decided, after last week’s class, to change our topic entirely. While I was excited to get to talk about Brave New World (since I’m reading it right now, too), we couldn’t find more than a few newspaper articles about the 1988 censorship case at Yukon High School. Essentially, the case started and ended within 2 days, and there was hardly any material.
Fortunately, Baylee has connections in the librarian world. She learned about a case where an entire author was challenged: young adult novelist and poet Ellen Hopkins. Hopkins is the author of several controversial teen-centered books like Crank (2004), which deals with meth addiction, and Impulse (2007), which handles themes of mental illness and has some sexual content. However, the New York Times Best-selling author has been praised by experts on these subjects for the way her work handles them, especially in educating teens away from things like drug abuse.
The Case
In 2009, just a few years after Hopkins released Glass, the sequel to Crank, a librarian at Whittier Middle School in Norman, Oklahoma (just about 30 minutes from us) won a contest to have Ellen Hopkins make a speech at the school. In the time leading up to the scheduled talk, a group of Whittier parents submitted a formal challenge of Glass, but the administration did not process it in time, instead canceling Hopkins’s visit altogether.
Thankfully, Hopkins was allowed to speak at a college in Moore instead; the event drew crowds from all over the state due to the media coverage of the controversy.
This will be an ideal case for us to explore because we have already uncovered a rich store of documents and media related to the event. Ellen Hopkins herself responded to the incident with a lengthy blog post, including a poem about censorship. It can be found here: https://ellenhopkins.livejournal.com/7107.html
Moving Forward
While most of the records and resources so far have been easily accessible, some have evaded our search. In the wake of the Norman superintendent’s decision to not allow Hopkins to speak at any Norman Public School, conservative Oklahoma City local news anchor Kelly Ogle used his weekly “My Two Cents” segment to show support for the ban on Glass and Crank, saying he was glad that the “inappropriate” books were taken off the library shelves. The clip of this airing, however, seems to be removed from the internet entirely. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Hopkins herself blogged about the newscaster and riled up her devoted fanbase.
The superintendent at the time of the incident, Joe Siano, retired a few years ago. We sent an email last week to the current Norman Public School superintendent, Nick Migliorino, requesting information such as school board proceedings, patron complaints, and adoption or challenging policies and procedures. We received a reply from the district’s Director of Public Relations, asking us questions about the nature of the research and how publicly the findings will be presented. We are hoping to hear back from one of these officials sometime this upcoming week.
In the meantime, we have an appointment on Thursday with our university research librarian to inquire about research tools and resources. We are also planning on getting in contact with the Whittier Middle School librarian who originally coordinated Hopkins’s appearance, Karin Perry, who now lives in Texas. If we are able to set up a Skype interview with her, we could gain very valuable insight into how the incident unfolded.
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