Note: This article quotes explicit sexual content.
When Paula Allen first wanted pornography removed from her child’s school library, she didn’t realize that would be controversial. Everyone, she reasoned, agrees graphic descriptions of sexual intercourse and images of full-frontal nudity found in schools should be immediately removed.
The school board of Missouri’s Cameron R-I district, which serves 1,600 students in a suburb of Kansas City, disagreed. After two years of complaints from parents, this August the district put 36 of 80 challenged books behind the circulation desk, where publicly sponsored pornography continues to be available to minors so long as they have parent permission. Any explicit books that parents haven’t discovered yet, and future books selected by employees who have already used taxpayer funds to buy minors pornography, could still be on the shelves after the district denied parents library access.
“At my very first meeting [with] the superintendent… I all but begged him, ‘Let’s please work together in unity as a group, as parents, we have a concern. You have to address these concerns. Let’s work together,’” Allen explained. “[They] attempted to do essentially a character assassination, to discredit us and to make them, as in the school board and the school district administration, look like victims and make us look like villains. Because we’re standing up for our kids.”
A group of local parents has been battling to protect children in school libraries for more than two years. Allen and Heath Gilbert spoke with The Federalist about their efforts to keep pornographic books out of children’s hands and their school board’s effort to resist.
‘Erotica’ and ‘Intercourse’ in Children’s Library
Gilbert began looking into the issue in 2020, when sexually explicit library books were making national news.
“I went to the superintendent’s office and asked the question, ‘Hey, how do I get into the library? I’d like to look and see what books were there.’ And I asked the high school the same question,’” Gilbert told the Federalist. “I got the runaround. I never got an answer.”
Gilbert and local father Dan Landi resorted to investigating the matter themselves by January 2023. When high school librarian Tonya O’Boyle assured Landi pornographic books were not available to Cameron R-I students, Landi said he used the district’s online library catalog to confirm.
The results were shocking. Gilbert and Landi say they found more than 60 books containing sexually explicit content and queer ideology. Some contain erotica and detailed descriptions of sexual intercourse. Others contain sexually explicit visuals.
“All Boys Aren’t Blue,” George M. Johnson’s self-proclaimed “memoir-manifesto” detailing the author’s “journey growing up as a queer Black man,” is available at Cameron High School. Students now need parent approval to check it out from behind the circulation desk, the catalog says. Here is an excerpt (warning: graphic):
There is a fear, as with most things that you are doing for the first time. But this was my ass, and I was struggling to imagine someone inside me. And he was . . . large. But, I was gonna try. I had previously topped someone who clearly enjoyed it, but he had been enjoying anal sex before I ever came along. He knew what to expect. I didn’t. As an avid porn watcher, the only thing I knew about anal sex previously was that it was painful, or at least played up as such on the cameras….He got on top and slowly inserted himself into me. It was the worst pain I think I had ever felt in my life. He then added more lube and tried again, which felt better but not by much. He began his stroking motion. Eventually, I felt a mix of pleasure with the pain.
Local church leader Colleen Hardy read portions of this book aloud to the school board in 2023. Still, the district’s book review committee, composed of high school principal Jayson Erdman, assistant principal Derek Lannigan, librarian Tonya O’Boyle, English teacher Eden Beasley, and community member Andrew Henry, voted by secret ballot to keep the book in the high school library.
“The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, a coming-of-age story that covers racism, incest, and child molestation, is also available to children in the district’s library. This book is also recently marked as needing parent approval for teens to obtain. Here’s a (graphic) excerpt:
He put his head down and nibbled at the back of her leg…The confused mixture of his memories of Pauline and the doing of a wild and forbidden thing excited him, and a bolt of desire ran down his genitals, giving it length, and softening the lips of his anus. Surrounding all of this lust was a border of politeness. He wanted to f–k her tenderly. But the tenderness would not hold. The tightness of her vagina was more than he could bear. His soul seemed to slip down to his guts and fly out into her, and the gigantic thrust he made into her then provoked the only sound she made—a hollow suck of air in the back of her throat.
“How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity” by Michael Cart contains stories exploring “themes of gender identity, love, and sexuality” as well as graphics of male and female nudity. It can be borrowed by children in a school district library, now with parent permission.
Parents Challenge ‘Secret’ School Board Meetings
Gilbert shared his findings on Facebook in March 2023. He later created a website to share what he calls “the dirty book list” so parents can see the content for themselves.
Superintendent Matt Robinson alerted the school board after Gilbert went public with the existence of pornographic books in the school libraries. A series of emails uncovered in an open records request from Gilbert reveals that two individuals, including librarian O’Boyle, requested a “closed session” to address the school board and exclude parents.
Robinson declined, the emails show, stating that would make it seem like they were “hiding something.” He later remarked he didn’t “feel like giving our citizens another arrow to call the MO Ethics Commission or State Attorney General’s office.”
Robinson revealed he had known about the pornographic books since August 2022, writing, “We knew this day was coming and we just wanted something to say about our procedure.”
“I sat down with all librarians in August and shared my thoughts on controversial books and shared that our day is coming, it’s only a matter of time,” he said in another email, before seemingly alluding to Gilbert’s Facebook post. “Well our time arrived last Thursday.”
Gilbert and other parents addressed the Board of Education in March 2023, filing paperwork to challenge the books with adult content. A book review committee including several school administrators was assembled, per district policy.
“The decisions to keep all of these books started coming out,” Gilbert explained. “I asked for records through a Missouri Sunshine Law request, and I was told emphatically that there were no records available. I started inquiring into when those meetings were held, how they were held… [the book review committee members] were meeting in secret.”
Gilbert obtained copies of the vote ballots from these meetings, which were cast anonymously. The state’s Sunshine Law requires “meetings, records, votes, actions, and deliberations of public governmental bodies be open to the public unless otherwise provided by law,” including “advisory committees or subcommittees that report to a larger governmental entity.” Gilbert says the Cameron R-I school board violated the law, so he filed a complaint with state Attorney General Andrew Bailey.
By August, the Board of Education had overturned policy KLB AP-1, which gave local taxpayers the ability to challenge library books.
“We used to be able to come in every month…and we could talk about an issue until the issue was resolved,” Gilbert explained. “They rescinded all of the policies that allowed me to challenge a book [and] the creation of a book review committee. That policy was rescinded.”
Allen argued the library was not in compliance with the state’s Library Certification Requirement for the Protection of Minors in September 2023. The law requires “all eligible public libraries [to] file the certification required…with the state library” to receive funding. In response to Allen’s records request for the school’s filing, the district claimed they had nothing to share.
‘Cop-Out’ by School District
To appease parents, the high school added a form allowing parents to specify books their children cannot borrow from the library, and placed 36 books behind the circulation desk, where children must have parent permission to check them out. But Gilbert says the form doesn’t prevent kids from viewing explicit books that parents don’t know about yet.
“I can’t say I don’t want my child to read a book about incest, homosexuality…heterosexual sex acts, violence to include murder. I can’t select a topic. There is no system. There is no ability for a parent to restrict a book based on the content,” Gilbert explained. “I am required to know the content of the 33,000 books that are in the Cameron school district and I have to name every book by enable in order to restrict my child from reading that adult content.”
Emails obtained by The Federalist show Allen’s request to school board president Pam Ice to access the library and browse the books. In July 2024, Ice denied the request, rendering the parent consent form pointless — if parents can’t enter their children’s school library, they can’t name books in that library they don’t want their children reading. They can only rely on checking the library catalog against explicit books they’ve heard about elsewhere.
Allen says the school’s actions are part of a greater effort to remove parental authority over children’s education. Parenting, she says, has been replaced by alleged “professional expertise.”
“There’s not one person on this planet that knows what’s best for my children more than I do,” Allen said. “So for them to throw that weight around like they have more value and should be entrusted more so than a parent…I think they’ve elevated themselves to a level that is not reasonable.”
Parents ‘Not Going Anywhere’
The push against pornography in Cameron children’s libraries has stalled as the school district refuses to take action.
“They won’t negotiate with us. They won’t talk with us. They won’t even tell us the school district’s position on what type of content is appropriate,” Gilbert said. “They absolutely refuse to have any dialogue with the community. They will not answer any of our questions. We ask often, what is the educational value of this book? What is the curriculum objective of this book?”
But he’s not giving up the fight. Neither is Allen, although her daughter has graduated and her son has moved to a private school.
“I will continue to advocate for them,” Allen explained. “ I’m still here, and I’m not going anywhere…because all kids matter, not just mine.”
The Federalist contacted Ice and Robinson to ask if they believe pornographic content is appropriate or educational for minors. The Federalist also included excerpts of pornographic material contained in the school library and asked if Ice and Robinson considered the material “sexually explicit.”
Robinson did not reply to the request for comment. Ice replied with a link to the district policies and the school board’s timeline of events.
Ice did not respond to the Federalist’s second attempt to confirm whether she believes pornographic content, including a graphic description of anal sex, is appropriate for minors or educational.
