Against Policy, Flagler’s Book-Challenge Appeal Panels Dim Faculty and District Vote to Minority Status

The make-up of the committee is not in line with school board policy, giving parents and community members a lopsided presence on the panel–at the expense of district staff and faculty. The make-up of a second appeals committee waiting in the wings is even more lopsided, severely diminishing the role of school and district staffers.

The 14-member appeals committee is made up of members of the community who don’t have children in public schools, parents with children in schools, and district administrators and school faculty. The non-district representatives were drawn from upward of 70 people who turned up or showed interest in being part of such appeals committees when Assistant Superintendent Lashakia Moore held an information session about the system on Feb. 6.

Moore said then that she would seek to maximize community and parental representation on the appeals committees. The district appeared intent on accommodating every person who showed interest in being appointed to a committee, even at the expense of following policy. That has resulted in a less rigorous, more loosey-goosey system framing what has been one of the district’s most vexing issues of the last two years.




The selection of district and school staffers was the administration’s decision. The selection of parents and community members was randomized by computer from the pool of some 70 applicants.

The panel reviewing the Sold decision will meet at 6 p.m. on March 6 at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell, in Room 3B. The meeting is open to the public, though it isn’t clear if public participation will be permitted. It is not permitted at the school level.

The committee breaks down as follows:

Flagler County School Board Policy 411 sets out the make-up of the committee. The policy language is not ambiguous: “The Superintendent shall appoint a District Review Committee with the following composition.” The policy then sets out nine clearly defined appointments, with faculty and district staff holding a 6-vote majority.




The actual appointments follow the policy in so far as district and school-based personnel is concerned. But with regards to three other categories and the total number of members on the panel, the make-up does not  follow policy. It stacks the panel in favor of parents and community members, reducing faculty and district votes to a minority.

The committee by policy was to have only one member of the community at large (that is, a local resident with no children in public schools). It has four. By policy, it is to have one “representative of a school parent organization,” which is being interpreted as a parent with one or more children in school. It has four. It is to have one representative of the Public Library board of trustees. It has none.

While it was to have only two parents or members of the community, six school and district staffers and a library representative, the committee meeting Monday will have eight members of the public or parents, and six school staffers.

So that first appointed appeals committee has 14 voting members (instead of nine), the second has 20. The even numbers in both raises the possibility of a tie vote, which would be avoided had the original make-up been followed (or if the membership was odd-numbered). And no representation from the public library, usually a staunch advocate in defense of books.

Assistant County Attorney Sean Moylan informed Holly Albanese, director of the Flagler County Public Library, that the district could not compel a library trustee to serve on the district committee. Albanese met with Moore to let her know the decision of the library board not to participate. “It did not appear to me from her comments that it was a requirement, just if we are interested,” Albanese said.




While the expansion of the committee may allow the district to claim that it is being more welcoming of community voices, diverting from policy potentially creates a legal liability for the district, especially as the number of community and parental members appears very fluid.

The next district-level committee, which will take up another appeal, is even more lopsided. It has 13 different parents or community members–three parents, 10 community members–and six school staffers. That committee will take up the appeal of The Nowhere Girls on March 13. A school-based committee elected to keep the novel by Amy Reed on high school shelves, prompting what appears to be automatic appeals of decisions that don’t go the challengers’ way.

That committee breaks down as follows:

The parent and community-member make-up of three additional district-level committees have been formed as well. But those appeals committee have yet to be assigned titles to review.

In the increasingly muddy maze of the school district’s attempt to deal with a suppuration of attempted book bans, appeals committee are different from school-based committees, and neither have the final decision.

A joint committee of the two high schools voted earlier this year to keep Patricia McCormick’s Sold on the shelves after Shannon Rambow and Terri McDonald each filed a challenge to the book in an effort to ban it, one of 44 challenges affecting 22 titles they and Cheryl Lackey filed since last summer. That school-level decision is now being appealed.




The appeals committee will discuss the book in open session and vote on whether to recommend upholding the school-based committee’s decision or reverse it. The appeals committee’s vote, however, will only be a recommendation to Superintendent Cathy Mittlestadt, who will then decide whether to ratify the recommendation. The superintendent’s decision may be appealed to the school board, but only if Mittelstadt elects to keep the books on the shelves. If she decides to ban it, her decision may not be appealed.

An appeal to the school board is in fact expected should the appeals committee and the superintendent align on the side of protecting access to the book, which would only be available as a voluntary reading choice in libraries, not as assigned reading in any curriculum.

Sold is a 2006 novel written from the point of view of a 13-year-old Nepalese girl sold into sexual slavery in a brothel in Indian. The story reflects the experience of large numbers of minor girls and boys worldwide, including in the United States, who are victims of human trafficking, a problem human rights agencies, governments and the United Nations have been highlighting in order to combat it. (It was the subject of a recent Flagler Tiger Bay’s keynote presentation.) In 2020, the last year for which figures are available, the number of children believed to be in the trade fell worldwide for the first time in 20 years, by 11 percent–except in the United States and Europe. It rose 26 percent in the United States.

While Sold, written by a journalist, contains two scenes alluding to–but not explicitly describing–the child being raped by customers, the story is entirely focused on the child’s psychology and evolution from an innocent, hard-working school-girl in the hills of Nepal to an object of trade and abuse in a large Indian city. It is written in the luminescent language of a child, often in verse, and doesn’t once contain the word “sex” or its derivatives.

Sold was a National Book Award finalist in 2006. It was on numerous lists for the best books of 2006, including Publishers weekly, National Public Radio and the American Library Association. It won the Gustav-Heinemann Peace Prize in 2009. The prize, named for a former president of West Germany, is awarded annually to authors of young adult literature who promote world peace.

It’s local challengers claim it’s “pornography.”




The trio of challengers–Rambow, Lackey, McDonald–are alone in seeking book bans. Two of them have no children in schools. They are taking advantage of a change in state law that now permits any local resident to challenge library holdings in a county’s public schools, but not at the county library, which has taken a decidedly defiant position against all bans. The three challengers are members of the vigilante group known as the “moms for liberty.” It has few members. But its state representative has Gov. Ron DeSantis’s ear.

There is no evidence that the challengers have read the books, and a lot of evidence that they have not–that they have plagiarized their challenges, page for page, title for title, from a national website that caters to book-burners. In essence, the challengers have spent all of a few minutes cutting and pasting a few lines and page numbers to file challenges.

To address them, the district is devoting a disproportionate amount of school and community resources, time, money and energy. By law, the district has no choice, however frivolous or intellectually dishonest the challenges may be. That’s why 15 men and women will meet in committee after hours, many of them after a full days’ work, to review a book they will have been required to read (it would have taken three or four additional hours of their time beforehand) and will now be required to judge, possibly to no end, since their decision is not binding.