An elementary-school administrator in Mississippi has said he was fired for reading I Need a New Butt!, a humorous children’s book about bottoms, to a class of second-graders.
The incident has spurred criticism from free speech advocates, who say the termination could have a chilling effect at a time of conservative-fueled pushes for book bans in schools across the US.
On March 2, Read Across America Day, pupils aged six and seven from Hinds County, Mississippi, were waiting for a school administrator to read to them in a Zoom session, the New York Times reported.
The administrator was unable to attend so Toby Price, an assistant principal at Gary Road Elementary School who was in his office, stepped in. He picked up I Need a New Butt! by Dawn McMillan and started reading to about 240 children.
I Need a New Butt!, for readers aged between four and eight, is about a boy who sets out to find a new bottom after seeing a “crack” in his buttocks which makes him afraid that it is broken.
Price, who has been teaching for 20 years, said Hinds County School District Superintendent Delesicia Martin called him into her office and told him he was being placed on leave.
Two days later, he was accused of breaking the Mississippi Educator Code of Ethics, and fired, Price said.
“I expected a write up,” Price told the Times. “I did not expect to get terminated. I cried the entire way home.”
In a letter to Price, the superintendent reportedly called the book “inappropriate,” pointing to references to flatulence and saying that it “described butts in various colors, shapes and sizes (example: fireproof, bullet proof, bomb proof).”
Price said school officials told him they feared complaints from parents and Martin said that he had been “unprofessional.”
Price told the Times that he had a lawyer and would fight his firing.
Neither Martin nor members of the school board immediately responded to requests for comment from the Guardian.
Authors’ organization Pen America urged school officials to reverse their decision.
“Certainly, the book in question is meant to be humorous for a young audience, and fellow educators might reasonably question if it was the optimal choice for this particular occasion,” Pen America said.
“But in positioning the act of reading a book as a violation of ethics, the district is implying that any educator could be terminated under similar circumstances, whenever an anonymous source feels a book read to students is ‘inappropriate’ for any reason,” it said.
“Such a precedent could be readily abused, enforced with unbridled discretion to censor the reading of books in schools,” it said.
Price told the Times that literacy instruction was crucial at his school, in a county where more than 21 percent of people live under the poverty line.
“We have a lot of reluctant readers,” Price said. “I am a firm believer that reluctant readers need the silly, funny books to hook them in.”
He has three children to support, two with severe autism, he said, adding: “I’m tired. I’m stressed. I’m overwhelmed. I need to work.”
Price received support on social media, including on the school’s Facebook page.
“My granddaughter heard him read the book and thought it was hilarious and not at all inappropriate!” one commenter wrote. “When they do have a hearing, believe me, me and Baby Girl’s gonna be front and center!”
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