A school board in Kansas has been confronted over a book described as “borderline erotic literature” being assigned to 9th grade high school students.
Freshmen at a school in liberal Overland Park, Kansas were assigned to read “The Poet X,” a 2018 novel that follows 15-year-old “Afro-Latina heroine” Xiomara Batista, as she works through her conflict with her Catholic mother via slam poetry, and falls in love with her lab partner.
Izabella Borowiak-Miller, an alumni of Blue Valley Southwest High School, confronted the Blue Valley Board of Education, based in Overland Park, Kansas, as to why ninth graders in the district, including her younger brother, were forced to read and engage with sexualised material at school in a live streamed meeting of the body.
SHOCKING: @IzziDABELL exposes KANSAS school district pushing mandatory sexually erotic curriculum for minors.
School Board left SPEECHLESS as passages from the pornographic The Poet X are read aloud. pic.twitter.com/47QFAWzpzj
— Alex Dwyer (@AlexDwyerKS) January 10, 2023
Despite the narrator being a 15-year-old girl, the book is “borderline erotic literature,” according to Borowiak-Miller, who read out a number of the extremely sexualised quotes during the school board meeting, including:
- “The boy moves his body closer to mine, and I can feel his hands drop down from my waist to my hips then brushing up toward these boobs. I hate that I now push them at him like an offering.”
- “I am the baby fat that settled into D-cups and swinging hips so that the boys who called me a whale in middle school now ask me to send them pictures of myself in a thong.”
- “Bought tampons that I shoved into my body the way I’d seen Father Sean cork the sacramental wine.”
- “My shirt comes off… my jeans unsnap… naked skin rubs against mine… fingers touch my breasts.”
- “But I also feel him pressed against me. The part of him that’s hard. And when his hand brushes my thigh and then moves up…”
“I am shocked that my brother was subjected to such a book at the impressionable age of 14,” she said. “These are passages I, as a 25-year-old adult, would feel uncomfortable and inappropriate reading in front of a group of adults, let alone 14-year-olds.”
Not only did the teenage students have to read the book, but the audiobook was reportedly played during class time.
Despite the student handbook for the school district claiming protections exist for students against “exposure to obscenity and indecency,” Borowiak-Miller revealed that a request from her mother to her brother’s teacher for him not to be exposed to any sexually explicit content, was “completely ignored.”
“It is almost unnecessary to say that the school had no business using their time and their power over students to expose them to this.”
She concluded, “I am disgusted that my brother was subjected to this when all he and his peers did was trust Blue Valley with their education.”
This is not the first time that a school has come under fire for issuing “The Poet X,” to students. In 2020, Lake Norman Charter School in North Carolina was sued by parents due to the book’s supposedly anti-Christian bias, something Borowiak-Miller also highlighted in her testimony on Monday.
“Our position is that a state actor, much less a secondary public school, cannot promote or use materials that explicitly disparage a particular faith tradition,” said Joel Bondurant, the attorney for the parents in the 2020 case.
