VA School Officials Deny Banning Anne Frank's Diary

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By Shanti Menon -- School Library Journal, 02/24/2010

Quiet Culpeper County, VA, was thrown into a national uproar last month over allegations that the school district banned of a version of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. Now school officials say the book was never banned or removed from middles school shelves, and that it’ll be reviewed this spring before a final decision is made whether to include it in the fall curriculum.


A photograph of Anne Frank taken in December 1941. Photo: AFF Bazel/ AFH Amsterdam

James Allen, director of instruction for Culpeper County Public Schools (CCPS), says he pulled the definitive edition of the teenage holocaust victim’s diary without a formal review following a parental complaint about its sexual content. The passages in question involve Anne describing her vagina and her sexual feelings for another girl and were edited out of the first published version, printed in 1947.

Superintendent Bobbi Johnson initially appeared to support the move, but a statement issued later by CCPS said that both versions of the book were available to students and that no ban had taken place. Johnson later explained to The Washington Post that the complaint had come from the mother of an eighth-grader, who requested that her daughter not participate in reading the book aloud in class. District teachers have used Frank’s diary for several years in eighth-grade honors English classes.

Word of the ban spread in the press and the blogosphere, even meriting a mention in a Jay Leno monologue. County residents expressed dismay, outrage, and embarrassment over the incident.

“My guess is that some sort of preliminary decision was made at the school level,” says school board member Bob Beard, “and that’s not how we do things.” Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.

In the spring, a committee of district English teachers and curriculum advisors will review both versions of the diary, as well as other books, to develop a reading list for middle and high school English classes, which parents and teachers can review before the start of the school year.

Culpeper County residents now have ample opportunity to form their own conclusions about the book. An anonymous donor recently dropped off four brand new copies of The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition at the Culpeper County Library.

“There’s nothing like banning a book to make sure it gets read,” says library director Susan Keller. Two copies have already been checked out.