Cobb County student activists keep up the fight against book bans

The Cobb County School District has been a hotbed of controversy since several books were first pulled from school shelves for containing “sexually explicit” and “inappropriate” materials in 2023, a decision Superintendent Chris Ragsdale doubled down on at the Jan. 18 board meeting. 

Ragsdale said his team “continues to actively review the millions of books in our schools” for content considered “explicit.”

“We have a professional and moral obligation to protect students from vulgar, lewd, sexually explicit, obscene pornographic material,” Ragsdale said. 

For some Cobb County students, the declaration is expected. A group of organizers from the grassroots collective the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition have worked since 2022 to get students into school board meetings around Atlanta — particularly in Cobb County. 

At the Jan. 18 meeting, several students showed up to provide public comment regarding the district’s book bans. They’ve come out again and again, despite challenges, to demand a stop to the book bans. 

High school senior Hunter Buchheit, Georgia Youth Justice Coalition’s narrative strategist, put it simply in his public comment: 

“Book bans don’t seem to be going away, and so neither do we,” Buchheit said.

The young journalist and organizer said books give young people an opportunity to see themselves in prose, particularly with diverse perspectives and backgrounds that represent kids from different backgrounds. 

“Book bans steal away that opportunity for connection, for understanding and for self-actualization,” Buchheit said. 

He’s been organizing against book bans since the first novels were pulled from shelves in 2023, a move that made national headlines. Popular far-right social media user Chaya Raichik, also known as “Libs of TikTok” claimed responsibility for filing the first complaint to the school district. 

That complaint led to bans on “Flamer,” a graphic novel by Mike Curato about a Filipino-American boy bullied at a summer camp for being queer and “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” by Jesse Andrews, about two boys who befriend a girl diagnosed with cancer.

Since then, Superintendent Ragsdale has reaffirmed his decision. 

Just days before the Jan. 18 Cobb County meeting, Marietta City Schools voted to ban  23 books in addition to “Flamer” and “Me and Earl and the Dying girl.” The list includes popular novels like “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chobsky, “13 Reasons Why” by John Asher and “This Book is Gay” by Juno Dawson. Parents filed appeals to keep the books Marietta shelves to no avail. 

At the Cobb meeting, Ragsdale complimented the Marietta City School District on the decision, saying the two districts have been “working on the same problem, just with a few less books.”

“Some have taken issue with the process we’ve used to remove some of the books we’ve already found, and I feel the need to repeat what I’ve already said before,” Ragsdale said.  “It simply does not matter how we learn about sexually explicit books being in our schools; once we learn sexually explicit content is in front of our students its our responsibility to protect our students and inform our parents.” 

The student organizers at Georgia Youth Justice Coalition don’t see it as protection. Ava Bussey, the coalition’s digital director, spoke for the first time at the board meeting on her 18th birthday — the age she needed to be to speak at a meeting without a parent. 

“We’re old enough to experience a hostile environment that Cobb County creates for us,” Bussey said. 

Opponents of the book bans have called out the decision-making process as being “anti-LGBT,” as several books pulled for “explicit” or “inappropriate” content focus on LGBTQ+ characters and themes. Nationally, The American Library Association found that of the 2,571 books pulled in 2022 alone, the “majority” were written by and about LGBTQ+ people and people of color. 

Cobb County student and Georgia Youth Justice Coalition Cobb community organizer Maariya Sheikh said limiting books doesn’t create a “good mental health environment.” 

“This is just a scapegoat, right, to mask their bigotry,” Sheikh said. “The way they’re going about this is really harming a lot of students. I know a lot of my friends feel that their identities are being negated by the board and they’re being invalidated.” 

The young organizers said the language around the banned books doesn’t help, either. Most of the literature is deemed “sexually explicit” or “obscene,” but the parameters for deciding what must go are not clearly defined. 

“What you’re telling kids and us all is that if you have an identity that is in one of these books, it’s just inappropriate and that’s not it,” Bussey said. 

Georgia Youth Justice Coalition is fighting the Cobb County book bans from “all different angles,” according to the activists. They keep showing up to meetings, where they are told to wait outside in the cold to sign up for public comment or barred for standing in the walkway of the meeting room. They organize on-campus protests and write opinion editorials for national outlets. 

“When we’re here, they at the very least have to sit with that discomfort for whatever, two minutes,” Bussey said. 

More than anything, coalition organizers hope their work can plant the seed of civic engagement. 

“I feel like a lot of what we do is focused on community building so that people feel more empowered to speak up,” Buchheit said. “They know that even if the lawmakers and their officials are gonna sit there and stare at them like they have three heads, that at least they’ll have the friends and fellow organizers around them to encourage them to uplift their voices.”

All three organizers are 18 years old, and they know people will be drawn to this year’s presidential election. But they want young people to get informed and engaged locally, too. 

“The change starts from the ground up,” Buchheit said. “If they’re going to see the thing on the news they want to change or see big articles about book bans sweeping, they have to be willing to take action at the root of where those issues are happening.”