What They Said, part 2 Parents and Students Respond to WSSD Book Removals

SRS parent Michael Raffaele presents Wallingford-Swarthmore School Board members with free copies of two of the three books temporarily removed from a fifth-grade classroom in February. Read the story.

Last week, the Swarthmorean published several statements given by district parents and students during the public comment section of the March 9 Wallingford-Swarthmore school board meeting. The speakers were responding to the removal of three books on LGBTQ+ subjects from a fifth-grade classroom library. The books were removed after a parent complained about one of them, “George,” a novel by Alex Gino about a transgender girl, intended for readers age 8 to 10. After the books were reviewed by the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District’s director of secondary education, Denise Citarelli Jones, they were returned to the classroom. The district says it is now developing new policies to guide future classroom-library book choices. 

Before public comment began, WSSD board president David Grande read his own statement, affirming his and the school district’s determination to ensure “that every single student feels valued, respected, and welcomed.” He pledged that the administration was working toward putting procedures in place to support those goals.

These two statements, given by seniors at Strath Haven High School, were not prepared in advance, but were offered on the spur of the moment. They have been lightly edited for space and clarity. 

Visibility Is Beyond Important

My name is Grayson. I’m a senior at Strath Haven. I’ve been in the Wallingford-Swarthmore schools for all 12 years of my education. My experience wasn’t always a good one. My freshman year of high school, I came out as transgender to everyone at the school, and since then, it hasn’t been good. 

I went through a very long time in my life when I could not go to school without having panic attacks. And I couldn’t come home from school without thinking about ending my life that night because of all the bullying and harassment I had to go through, just because people didn’t understand. Because people didn’t accept who I am. 

The past two years I’ve been educating, I’ve been going around to different places. I’ve even spoken to the school here about my experiences, and how we can bring LGBTQ topics more into classrooms, and I’ve brought it into classrooms [myself]. But it’s not enough, because people aren’t listening when I go into classrooms. When I talk, I’m just that weird LGBTQ kid.

The message that I want to send out tonight is that visibility is beyond important. We need to normalize this in classrooms, so that my experience — of being 13 years old, and sitting in middle school afraid to show the world who I am — can never happen to anyone again. Thinking about what could happen if we don’t change something — thinking that other kids could end up like me — is heartbreaking. Because I would never want any other student, any other child, to go through what I had to. 

Grayson Ray
Wallingford

It’s About Kids

My name is Alex Melly, and I’m a senior at Strath Haven High School. I can tell you that we do live in a really, really accepting community. We do. And that’s a great thing. But — as you’ve heard from students, as you’ve heard from parents, and as you hear from some teachers — diversity and inclusion are not talked about enough. Not nearly enough. The idea that there are people in the world who are being ostracized is something that doesn’t get talked about enough, period.

Grayson and I made efforts in high school to be involved in clubs that talk about that stuff. But if we hadn’t done that, I’m not sure that we’d actually have been exposed to it at all. Because — with all due respect to the importance of the sleep study the school did— we heard about that study at least 10 or 15 times in the last year or two. But I can easily count on one hand the number of times that we’ve had seminars on — or surveys collecting information about — people’s feelings about LGBQ youth, or their feelings about black and brown youth, at Strath Haven High School. And I can count the number of times that we’ve talked about mental health.

It’s about kids. At the very end of the day, you’re serving that little kid in a classroom who thinks they’re weird. Guess what? They’re not weird. They’re really normal, and it’s really hard for them to grow up and be surrounded by people who are constantly telling them they’re not normal. It’s really hard for them to look at TV and see people calling people names. It’s really hard to be in an environment where you’re called names. When all you’re trying to do is get an education.

Alex Melly
Swarthmore