CAMERON, Missouri (LifeSiteNews) – The battle continues in a Missouri school district to keep scores of sexually explicit books from children despite the lack of cooperation from state and local officials.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, since mid-2023 community members in Missouri’s Cameron R-1 School District have been raising concerns about dozens of troubling books in the high school library, including All Boys Aren’t Blue, Lucky, and The Female of the Species, which contain graphic sexual content, including explicit descriptions of rape, incest, and homosexual acts. On Thursday, local parent and retired Missouri State Highway Patrolman Dan Landi told LifeSiteNews the number of explicit books they’ve identified so far is up to approximately 200.
District officials gave lip service to the possibility of restricting certain titles on the basis of age but also said that the process would be lengthy and shouldn’t take away from the district’s primary educational goals.
The Cameron School Police Department concluded an investigation into the district last November that found no violations. The Missouri Department of Education ignored the parents’ complaints as well, with the state board of education and Cameron Superintendent Matt Robinson both claiming the books did not violate state laws.
Even Republican state Rep. Dean Van Schoiack was content to declare that “the school has addressed the issue and put parents in charge,” and that it was not his job to tell school boards what to do.
The district ostensibly said that it would remove or restrict specific books in response to parents submitting signed forms. But fellow concerned citizen Heath Gilbert explained at the time that “there are more than 30,000 books in our school district” and “(p)arents are responsible for knowing which of those 33K they do not want their (children) to read, and list them individually by title and author.” The district does not “catalog the subjects of books in a manner which would make that feasible.”
At the time of LifeSite’s November 2023 report, Landi said the Clinton County Sheriff’s Department was investigating the matter in response to a complaint he filed. But that complaint has similarly turned up empty.
As detailed last month by The Federalist, the district finally agreed to put just 36 of the challenged books behind the circulation desk, where students can check them out with parental consent but library-goers cannot stumble upon them accidentally. However, the move leaves dozens of books, both identified and ones yet to be discovered, fully accessible to children.
Along the way, district officials tried to keep the situation under wraps, with an open records request eventually revealing emails in which officials requested it be dealt with in a “closed session” without parents, which Robinson ultimately declined so as to keep from “giving our citizens another arrow to call the MO Ethics Commission or State Attorney General’s office.” At the same time, however, the emails showed Robinson admitting “(w)e knew this day was coming” because he had been aware of the books since August 2022.
Yet the district continued to withhold records detailing book review committee meetings despite Missouri’s Sunshine Law. Parents also argued that Missouri’s Library Certification Requirement for the Protection of Minors law, which requires “all eligible public libraries (to) file the certification required … with the state library” was not being followed.
“Last April, we ran two candidates for two open seats on the school board,” Landi added. “We both lost thanks to a coordinated smear campaign by the school district, local businesses, and our newspaper office.” LifeSiteNews has reached out for more information on these races, and will update this story upon reply.
Most recently, in July, Cameron R-1 School Board president Pam Ice refused a request to let parents inspect books themselves, claiming it was “not the practice of the district to permit members of the general public into individual classrooms for any purpose,” and that the district would instead merely provide a list of books it was reviewing itself.
The parents contend that this is a violation of Missouri Statute 170.231, which states that every school board “shall provide that all public school instructional material intended for use in connection with any public school classroom instruction, or any public school research or experimentation program or project, shall be available for inspection by any person.”
Despite such persistent resistance, the parents aren’t giving up. “We continue to vocalize our concerns at school board meetings to no avail, as the board continues to vilify and obstruct us,” Landi told LifeSite on Thursday.
The parents continue to share updates on the situation and resources on the issue via the Cameron R-1 School District Exposed Facebook page, the Cameron School District Exposed website, and the Show Me Transparency X account.
The indoctrination of children with radical sexual ideologies and other left-wing agenda items has long been a major concern in American public schools, from libraries to athletic and restroom policy to drag events to classroom materials to even socially “transitioning” troubled children without parental knowledge or consent. Many schools have also displayed hostility to the rights and employment of individual teachers who refuse to go along with such agendas, regardless of their treatment of or rapport with gender-confused students.
The far-left American Library Association opposes any meaningful limits on children’s access to adult material, stating in its Library Bill of Rights that content “should not be excluded because of the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation” or “because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval” and that a “person’s right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views,” without any means of restricting access to certain material on the basis of “chronological age.”