Parents question racy books on Collier County school shelves

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COLLIER COUNTY, Fla. – WINK News has new information to a racy reading controversy in middle and high schools.

Last week, Collier County Public Schools pulled a link of sexually explicit books from an online recommended reading list. But as WINK News found out, there are now claims books just as risqué are inside Collier schools.

“They’re highly inappropriate,” said David Bolduc.

The Organization Parents ROCK is now questioning the district about four books: The Bluest Eye, Beloved: A Novel, Killing Mr. Griffin and Dreaming In Cuban.

“They have graphic and sexual content, graphic violence, violence with women both physically and verbally, bestiality.”

Bolduc tells WINK News those books can be found in several middle and high school libraries.

“If I were standing across the street and handing out these books to middle school children for instance, I’d probably have a big problem.”

Even though Collier County Public Schools doesn’t require or recommend students read these books, Bolduc said “they can check it out and a parent wouldn’t know better whether they have access to it or not.”

So, he wants to know why these books are available to the students.

“I think it stops when the district finally establishes a dialogue with us parents saying, here’s the process that we went through in selecting these books and we want to know why they made it through that process.”

The spokesman for the district said that just because books are listed in the library catalog doesn’t necessarily mean they are available to the students. WINK News will talk to the district about the complaints on Friday.

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