Controversy
Spotswood made headlines briefly in 2000, when teacher Jeff Newton, with the backing of freedom of speech advocacy organizations including the ACLU and American Library Association, went to court over an incident covering several weeks in September 1999, when then principal C. James Slye ordered Newton to remove anticensorship pamphlets from his classroom's door that had been posted in observance of Banned Books Week. The pamphlet in question was a list of books that had been challenged or banned in schools, libraries and bookstores around the country during the late 1990s; these books include several revered and widely read American works, such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Color Purple, Of Mice and Men and Death of a Salesman, but also include highly sexualized or "vulgar" books that the US Supreme Court found legal to exclude from public schools in the 1982 case of Board of Education v. Pico. The ACLU charged that Spotswood was effectively censoring the anticensorship message of the pamphlet outside of his constitutional rights and blatantly failed to follow the Rockingham County School Board Policy for mediating issues related to controversial and sensitive materials. The suit was dismissed before the case could be heard, when Newton resigned from the district.
Read more about this topic: Spotswood High School (Virginia)
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