A Riverside schools committee has banned the book “The Fault in Our Stars” from its middle schools after a parent challenged the teen love story as inappropriate for that age group.

Following a parent’s similar complaint over a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in Cucamonga School District, the Rancho Cucamonga Middle School library reopened to students Tuesday following a book audit launched by the controversy.

On Monday afternoon, Riverside Unified School District’s book reconsideration committee voted 6-1 to pull all three copies of John Green’s 2012 novel from library shelves at Frank Augustus Miller Middle School and not to allow other schools to buy or accept the book as a donation.

The book will be allowed at high school libraries, said committee chairwoman Christine Allen, librarian at Arlington High School, where the meeting was held.

UPDATE: Author, school board members criticize decision

The vote was taken after parent Karen Krueger made her case to the committee and asked its members – teachers, parents, a principal, librarian and instructional services specialist – to remove the book or make it available for checkout only with parental consent.

Krueger said she didn’t want to “come off as a prude” or block anyone’s freedom to read. But she questioned whether the book should be available at the middle school library because the subject matter involves teens dying of cancer who use crude language and have sex.

“I just didn’t think it was appropriate for an 11-, 12-, 13-year-old to read,” she said. “I was really shocked it was in a middle school.”

Some committee members agreed.

“I still don’t think 12- and 13-year-olds need to read about a 16- and a 17-year-old having sex,” said STEM Academy teacher and committee member Jennifer Higgins.

Parent and committee member Julie Boyes, who voted against banning the book, said she thought Green was trying to show what a dying 16-year-old girl might go through, such as being angry and choosing to have sex because she didn’t know if she’d live to 17.

Students went to the library and requested the New York Times bestseller near the end of the last school year, shortly before the drama was released in June as a PG-13 movie. The book’s arrival was announced over the PA system and many kids read it, said Krueger, who has a twin girl and boy now in eighth grade there.

School librarians choose books, district spokeswoman Jacquie Paul said.

Krueger complained about the book to the principal in May after her daughter brought the novel home. The principal said the book must go through the district’s formal reconsideration process.

Since 1988, 37 books, including this one, have been challenged in the district. Until Monday, only one – Robert Cormier’s 1974 novel “The Chocolate War” – had been banned, and that was in 1996. That book includes sex, profanity and violence by members of a secret school society.

Green’s book is rated as suitable for “young adults,” which Allen said is sometimes defined as 12 through 18. District officials “strive” to choose age-appropriate reading materials as well as books students find interesting to encourage kids to read, Allen said.

Arlington principal and committee member Betsy Schmechel questioned whether students could handle reading about terminally ill teens.

“The thing that kept hitting me like a tidal wave was these kids dealing with their own mortality, and how difficult that might be for an 11-year-old or 12-year-old reading this book,” she said, later adding she thinks the review process worked. “If you have a process in place like this, then you have a way for anyone to be heard.”

Cucamonga School District officials closed the Rancho Cucamonga Middle School library last Wednesday after a parent, Isabel Casas Gallegos, complained a day earlier about inappropriate sexual content in John Updike’s 1981 work of fiction, “Rabbit is Rich.”

No other books were removed when Principal Bruce LaVallee and the assistant superintendent of educational services reviewed the entire collection through an online library book system. The donated book was pulled without going through the district’s normal review process because Superintendent Janet Temkin agreed the content was inappropriate for the age group.

“A committee was not necessary because the content of the book is not suitable for the age level of the students at the middle school,” she wrote in an email.

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