Massachusetts Police Apologize After Searching Middle School for ‘Gender Queer’ Book

A police department in western Massachusetts searched through a middle school classroom earlier this month for a book it believed contained sexually explicit materials, then apologized after about 100 local students and staff walked out in protest.

The Great Barrington Police Department said it was obligated to search a classroom at W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School after someone complained to the department that they saw a teacher hand students a book that contained "what they perceived to be concerning illustrations," the department wrote in a statement to CNN.

The tipster then sent photos of the supposed illustrations, which police eventually determined came from the graphic novel "Gender Queer: A Memoir" by Maia Kobabe.

Published in 2019, that book has drawn condemnation from conservative, parental-rights groups across the country, who say it contains several illustrations of young people engaging in sex that aren't appropriate for young children.

But LGBTQ activists say the memoir has been unfairly targeted because it features a queer character and explores gender identity.

The department said it sent a plainclothes officer into the classroom, who announced he was turning on his body camera, then proceeded to search for the book, the Berkshire Eagle reported. The officer ultimately came up empty-handed.

News of the search alarmed civil rights groups, including the ACLU of Massachusetts, which said it would try to obtain the body camera footage for review.

"Police going into schools and searching for books is the sort of thing you hear about in communist China and Russia," Ruth Bourquin, the organization's senior and managing attorney, told the Eagle. "What are we doing?"

Scores of LGBTQ students and staffers at nearby Monument Mountain Regional High School walked out of their classrooms last week to protest the search, the Eagle reported.

Both the police department and the school district have expressed remorse over how they handled the incident.

“As the Chief of Police for the Great Barrington Police Department, I apologize to anyone who was negatively affected by our involvement at the W.E.B. Dubois Middle School on December 8, 2023,” Great Barrington Police Chief Paul Storti wrote in a statement.

"If our involvement caused distrust and alarm, that was not our intention. I promise you our actions were not meant to disenfranchise anyone or influence school curriculum."

The Berkshire Hills Regional School District School Committee also issued an apology, adding that discussions over whether to keep a book inside the classroom "should be a purely educational issue."

The committee said it planned to hold a meeting on Jan. 11 to discuss how it should handle similar situations in the future.

Between January and September, there were nearly 700 attempts to censor library materials as well as efforts to remove over 1,900 titles, according to preliminary data from the American Library Association.