After an overwhelming show of support from educators, parents, and the local and larger community, an open school district review committee in Marion County, KY voted to keep John Green’s Looking for Alaska (Dutton, 2005) in the high school curriculum.

The committee meeting including a presentation by Emily Veatch, defending the value of the book for high school seniors. Planning to use the novel  in her senior English class at Marion County High School in Lebanon, KY, the teacher sent home permission slips so parents would have the option, if they wanted, to keep their child from reading the book. Indeed, one parent took Veatch up on that offer for her child, who would leave the room during those lessons.

“But the parent didn’t want other children discussing it either,” says Amy Morgeson, director of the Marion County Public Library.

That parent filed a challenge against Green’s novel, igniting a reaction from students, alumni, community members—and even John Green himself. The author took to Facebook, encouraging others to express their thoughts in support of the book, and Veatch, by email—and taking to task those who had chosen to judge the title “…on individual scenes ripped from their context,” he wrote on his Facebook page.

Marion County Public Library’s genealogy librarian Jama Watts built a banned books display with all of Green’s titles, Dav Pilkey's The Adventures of Captain Underpants (Blue Sky, 1997), Peter Parnell's Tango Makes Three (S & S, 2005), and at least one of Barbara Park's "Junie B. Jones" titles (Random House, 1992), says Watts.

Jama Watts proudly poses in front of her banned books display.

“We couldn’t believe what was happening,” she says. “I ran with [the display], and kind of went crazy, over the top.”

ALA had posted its support on its blog, as has the National Coalition Against Censorship on its site. The latter was in the form of a letter from the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Kids’ Right to Read Project—signed by American Booksellers for Free Expression, Association of American Publishers, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, National Council of Teachers of English, and PEN America's Children’s and Young Adult Book Committee—that argued “the fact that parents who might object to reading the book had the option of requesting an alternative assignment fully satisfies parents’ desire to control the education of their own children, but would not adversely affect the curriculum as a whole.”

Former students, too, wrote to the local paper, the Lebanon Enterprise, to note that banning the book “…to try to hide us from reality is to deprive us of the ability to mature and become adults in the community,” wrote Charles Shofner, an alum of Marion County High School and a current student at the University of Louisville, in a letter to the editor.

Morgenson adds that at least one of the school board members came to the library in advance of the committee ruling to check out Green's novel and read it.