Schools Restrict Children’s Book

A popular children’s novel about witches has been placed on a restricted list by the Escondido Union Elementary School District after four parents filed complaints that it promoted the occult and was too frightening.

School officials deemed “The Witches” to be “offensive” after the parents filed formal complaints in December. Parental permission is now required for pupils in kindergarten through the fifth grade to check the book out of the school library.

“It was offensive in terms of common decency standards,” said Assistant Supt. Jim Fitzpatrick, who made the decision to restrict the book, overriding a review committee’s 3-1 vote in December in favor of the book. The lone dissenter was a parent.

The book, which had been a New York Times Book of the Year, was written in 1983 by children’s author Roald Dahl, who also wrote “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” He died in 1990. “The Witches” was also made into a movie starring Anjelica Huston.

The restrictions, the first ever placed on any library book in the district, have led to charges of censorship by the one of the school district’s board members.

“The only way someone can access this book currently is if a parent specifically asks in writing to check that book out. And if the parent didn’t know that that book was removed in the first place, how do they know to request it in writing?” board member Dawna Nerhus asked. “The way that this situation was handled was inappropriate. We walk a very fine line when we get into censorship of certain material.”

The book, which the district has carried on its library shelves since 1984, had been reviewed by a district committee a year and a half ago when another parent, Linda Linthicum, brought a similar complaint. That committee unanimously approved the book’s continued use.

“It’s just a real scary thing for a child to have to listen to,” Linthicum said Tuesday, echoing the sentiments of the recent protesters. “Witchcraft is like a religion, and teachers shouldn’t be allowed to read that because Christianity can’t be read in the classroom.”

Nerhus has requested a review of the board policy that led to the removal of the book from the normal distribution shelves. Trustees agreed to review the policy Feb. 27.

The critically acclaimed book portrayed the battle of a child--turned into a mouse by witches--and his grandmother to rid the world of witches. The book warns that witches masquerade as ordinary women--their claws hidden in gloves and their baldness under wigs--and suggests that witches might live next door or be a teacher.

In their complaints to the district, the parents, whose names the school district refused to release, objected most strenuously to what they saw as the book’s promotion of occultism.

“We object to the introduction to the occult, to the teaching about witchcraft that this book claims to be fact, to the parts about cutting kids up, destroying them and making them disappear,” wrote one parent.

The parents objected to sections of the book that said: “This is not a fairy-tale. This is about REAL WITCHES,” and parts that talked about abusing and eating children.

“Down vith children! Do them in! Boil their bones and fry their skin! Bish them, sqvish them, bash them, mash them! Break them, shake them, slash them, smash them!” the book goes.

One parent complained that the book resulted in “confusion caused from mixing truth with fiction, unhealthy interest in the occult, (and) seeds of unhealthy fear and mistrust placed in children, especially concerning women.”

But Fitzpatrick, who said he did not know what prompted the rash of complaints against the book, said the book’s depiction of witches played no part in his decision.

“I didn’t find that the book in any way supported the occult. I don’t believe that it in any way presented the occult in such a favorable position that children would be converted to the occult or become fascinated with it or identify with it,” he said.

Instead, Fitzpatrick said the book was too real and “there was a concern in terms of whether or not youngsters at a primary age would become frightened.”

But Stan Reid, the principal at Glen View Elementary School and a member of the district’s textbook review committee, found the opposite to be true.

“It was a tongue-in-cheek approach and the bottom line was that good will overcome evil,” Reid said. “In talking with kids out in the playground and in the lunch lines, for the most part the kids thought it was hilarious. They understood that it was a fairy tale and it was make believe.”

Dahl also authored the popular children’s book “James and the Giant Peach” and wrote the screenplay for the 1968 movie “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” a comedy starring Dick Van Dyke.

“The Witches,” listed as a Notable Book by the American Library Assn., also had been listed as one of the top 10 most frequently challenged books and materials in the country during the 1990-91 school year, according to a report issued by the People for the American Way, a censorship watchdog group.

Despite challenges by parents in Oregon and Iowa, “The Witches” remained either on the normal-circulating library shelves or as part of the first-grade curriculum, according to the American Library Assn. The Escondido district is the first that the association knows of to restrict access to the book.

Virtually every district in the state has established district policies for handling curriculum or text complaints by parents with various levels of appeal, said Louise Adler, an assistant professor of educational administration at Cal State Fullerton. And many, including the San Diego Unified School District, have placed books on restricted lists.

Adler’s 1991 survey of 379 school districts in California showed that 42.9% of challenges to texts are rejected and in 9.7% of the cases restrictions, similar to those in Escondido, are placed on the texts. In 11.5% of the cases, the material was removed, while in the remaining 35.4% the schools made exceptions for the challenger’s child.

Issues surrounding witches and satanism were among the most common among the text challenges, appearing 19.7% of the time, Adler said.