NEW ROCHELLE, N.Y. – A suburban school district is reviewing its text-selection process after the discovery that a sexually suggestive section of a young woman’s memoir was ripped out of its 90 copies several years ago.
The New Rochelle schools had already denounced the vandalism targeting “Girl, Interrupted” by Susanna Kaysen, about her stay in a Massachusetts mental hospital. Superintendent Richard Organisciak has since followed that by announcing plans to “undertake a review of our policy and practices as they relate to the selection of materials in all formats.”
In addition, the New Rochelle High School English Department – where the decision to censor the book was made in 2004 – has issued a statement calling the decision “regrettable.”
The torn-out pages came to light when students in a film class this year were assigned to compare the book with the 1999 film version, which stars Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie.
Among the students who noticed the excised pages was the son of Robert Cox, who writes the blog, “New Rochelle’s Talk of the Sound.”
Cox e-mailed the English department chairwoman, who responded that the material was torn from the books because it was “of a sexual nature that we deemed inappropriate for teachers to present to their students.”
Cox says he blogged about the torn-out pages when his later e-mails to the principal and superintendent went unanswered. The blog brought public attention and the district announced its disapproval.
The book’s publisher, Vintage Books, denounced the censorship but said the district’s decision to replace all the torn copies was “a satisfactory redress of the situation.”