Cobb schools to push for rating system for books

The Cobb County School District will push for lawmakers to develop a rating system for books in an effort to “prevent inappropriate materials from being accessed by children.”

The school board approved new priorities on Thursday, which its lobbyists will focus on during the upcoming legislative session.

Superintendent Chris Ragsdale said that particular priority is about “common sense.”

“There’s ... content in some books that (has) no business being in any K-12 school,” he said Thursday. “Would any teacher show a rated-R movie in class? ... No, absolutely not.”

The state’s secondlargest district has publicly grappled with laws passed last year that limit what teachers can talk about in their classrooms. A Cobb teacher was fired in August after reading a book about gender to fifth graders — a move she is appealing to the Georgia Board of Education. Cobb also removed books with “sexually explicit” content from school libraries, to both criticism and applause.

Ragsdale referenced the rating system for movies, which was established by the Motion Picture Association, and a federal law that requires districts to block students’ access to obscene images, child pornography or content harmful to minors when using the internet, among other requirements.

Board member Becky Sayler, a Democrat, said the priority raised a lot of questions that made her hesitant to support it. She worried about the word “inappropriate” being too vague and leaving too much up to personal opinion, and suggested changing it to be “sexually explicit” or “pornographic.” She made a motion to that effect, but the board’s Republican majority voted down the effort. It also voted down a motion from Sayler to postpone the vote.

“I think we might just be creating more restrictions in our school district that are not helpful to children,” she said.