Geneva schools might pull Calvin and Hobbes
http://www.dailyherald.com/story.asp?id=170448
Responding to a complaint by a parent, Geneva school officials convened a committee Thursday to decide if a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon book — on some district elementary schools’ shelves since 1987 — should be removed.
Superintendent Michael Jacoby said the committee’s decision won’t be formal until it is delivered in a written report to him.
Jacoby said he expects to receive the report soon, but there is a “continuing process,” to a decision.
Jacoby can either accept or reject the committee’s recommendation, and his decision could be appealed to the school board, he said.
If the book is removed, it would be the first such action taken by the district, said Jane Gazdziak, superintendent for curriculum.
“It was written as an adult book,” she said. “It does refer to violence and sex.”
Named after a 16th-century theologian and 17th-century philosopher, Calvin and Hobbes are a 6-year-old boy and imaginary tabby cat/tiger, respectively, who go on a series of adventures.
Written by Bill Watterson and published by Missouri-based Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, the first of 17 Calvin books garnered a complaint about a month ago. Copies of that book were removed from elementary shelves, Gazdziak said.
Parent-teacher organizations probably bought them for libraries soon after the volume was published in 1987, Gazdziak said.
Four other Calvin and Hobbes books are circulated in Geneva school libraries, but just this book contains questionable material, she said.
“If my child brought it home, I probably wouldn’t have noticed,” she said. “(But) we’re looking at whether or not it supports district philosophy or whether it is offensive.”
Geneva, Batavia, Franklin Park, and St. Charles libraries list the book as adult non-fiction. The Glen Ellyn library lists the book as juvenile non-fiction.
The American Library Association, which keeps an official list of “challenged” books, does not list any objections nationwide to the Calvin book.
The Geneva committee deciding the fate of the book is made up of seven people including parents, an administrator, a librarian and teachers from an elementary and the middle and high schools.
A majority of the group must decide on a recommendation to be made to superintendent, Gazdziak said.
Either way, the district isn’t going to ban the book, Gazdziak said.
“If a child brought it to school, we wouldn’t take it away,” she said.
The Calvin strip ran in more than 2,400 newspapers from 1985 to 1996. Books featuring the duo have sold more than 30 million copies, McMeel said.
Inside scoop from my sister, who is an elementary school librarian in that town… - they complained specifically about one panel where Calvin uses the words ’sexual discrimination’, the many times Calvin says ‘Die!’, and that one strip where he stayed home sick from school & was watching TV. In that panel, he’s watching a soap. There’s lots of kissing noises, then one character says to the other “Wouldn’t it be great if we were married……… I mean to each other”. And, Calvin says something like “Boy, you sure learn a lot when you stay home from school”.
When my sister started telling me about it on the phone, I was incredulous, I said “What could possibly be wrong with Calvin and Hobbes? I’ve been reading it to Annie & Shelby before bed for the past month!” She laughed & called me a horrible mother 
