Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Southern Poverty Law Center
Last July, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a slew of controversial educational bills into law on the pretense of “keeping woke politics out of the classroom.” They included a law granting parents more control over school library selections, and another banning nebulously-defined “divisive concepts” from classrooms.
Around the same time, PEN America released a monthly update on “educational gag orders,” including Georgia’s “divisive concepts” law. With such legislation, the authors contended, “the vagueness is the point.” After all, overly ambiguous restrictions can prove to be the most repressive.
Georgia public school educator Katie Rinderle, who faces termination from Due West Elementary in Cobb County for reading her fifth grade students a book purchased from a school book fair, has experienced this bleak fact firsthand. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), she represents the first casualty of Georgia’s classroom censorship laws.