NY High School Interrupts ‘Girl, Interrupted'
RSSBy Rocco Staino -- School Library Journal, 12/12/2008
Why did someone at New Rochelle High School in Westchester, NY, tear out a chapter dealing with oral sex from Susan Kaysen’s Girl Interrupted (Turtle Bay, 1993)?
“The material was of a sexual nature that we deemed inappropriate for teachers to present to their students” Leslie Altschul, chair of the English department, told local blogger Robert Cox. “Since the book has other redeeming features, we took the liberty of bowdlerizing.”
And that admission has had many First Amendment advocates up in arms.
According to Principal Donald Conetta, 90 copies of the book—which was made into a film starring Angelina Jolie and Wynona Ryder in 1999—were ordered in 2001 as part of a 10th grade unit involving issues of mental health and conformity.
Since then, 50 copies of the book have remained at the school. It has been learned, however, that the offending pages were removed sometime in 2004.
In a recent letter from Schools Superintendent Richard E. Organisciak, he explained that a staff member had raised questions about some portions of the book being inappropriate for students. At t hat time, a decision was made to “excise some minor portions of the work,” which were sexual in nature.
This year, however, the book was identified as a supplemental reading assignment for a 12th grade film course and the original expurgated texts were used.
Organisciak went on to say that the original decision to remove the pages was made “at the building level, and would not have been reviewed either by the central administration or by the Board of Education.”
It’s unclear whether a school library copy of the book has been “bowdlerized” as well According to sources at the school, that copy is currently checked out.
Joan Bertin, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship says, “ Bowdlerizing is a particularly disturbing form of censorship since it not only suppresses specific content deemed ‘objectionable,’ but also does violence to the work by material that the author thought integral…it’s literary fraud.”
At a recent meeting of the board of education, the district released a statement saying that the Board has directed that the “full text of the book, as originally published, shall be substituted immediately, and that no further modifications of this type, i.e., removal of pages, shall be permitted under any circumstances.”
