The Wake County Public School System is investigating the appropriateness of a short story that was assigned to students at Athens Drive Magnet High School, spokeswoman Lisa Luten told WRAL News.
It comes after 15-year-old student Lorena Benson told board members in September that she was uncomfortable reading and discussing a short story that included a brief description of sexual activity between two cousins.
The school system confirmed that Benson's 10th grade English class was assigned to read “Tomorrow is Too Far” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The 2006 story is about a girl whose brother has recently died.
Conservative activists have taken up Benson's cause, and a well-known pastor disrupted a county school board meeting Tuesday night to challenge the assignment.
John Amanchukwu, a pastor known for challenging school boards across the country and working with national conservative groups, complained about library books available in some schools and the assignment given to Benson and then refused to leave to podium once his three minutes of public comment were over.
“Justice for Lorena Benson!” he shouted repeatedly.
That violated the school board’s meeting policy, and Chairman Chris Heagarty asked Amanchukwu to leave. Heagarty noted that state law prohibits “willful” disruptions of official meetings.
Heagarty apologized for the disruption after Amanchukwu left.
“It was a premeditated publicly stunt," Heagarty said. Amanchukwu is promoting his business, he said. “No one on this board is breaking the law.”
Heagarty took issue with Amanchukwu’s claims that school board members were “criminals” because certain books were “available” in schools that depict sexuality or gender identity, which Amanchukwu said violated “HB49.”
Senate Bill 49, also know as the Parents Bill of Rights, only prohibits instructional materials from teaching students about gender identity, sexuality and sexual activity in kindergarten through fourth grades. It doesn’t reference library book selections — inside of a teacher’s classroom library or inside of the schoolwide library.
Benson and her family were not in attendance during Tuesday’s meeting.
But her dad, Bruce Benson, talked with WRAL News on Wednesday.
“There’s thousands of great books that could be taught to kids,” he said. “Why does something in the school system and the teachers have to go out of the way to teach content that is so clearly over the line?”
Lorena Benson’s comment to the school board came during a Sept. 17 meeting, in which she also said she would be leaving the school, where she had only recently enrolled.
“This graphic, incestual, sexual language should not be taught in any class, much less an Honors English class,” Benson told the board.
Benson took issue with a sentence near the beginning of the story, published in Prospect magazine.
The passage reads, “It was not the summer you fell in love with your cousin Dozie because that happened a few summers before, when you both wiggled into the tiny space behind Grandmama's garage and he tried to fit what you both called his banana into what you both called your tomato but neither of you was sure which was the right hole.“
The school system began looking into the appropriateness of the assignment after Benson's comment during the meeting and before Tuesday's disruption. The Benson family never brought their concerns to the teacher or principal before speaking publicly.
The 15-year-old said her family moved to North Carolina from the Dominican Republic a few months ago.
Benson’s last day at Athens Drive was Sept. 20. She returned to her previous school, an online and in-person Christian homeschool co-op based out of Washington State.
District officials declined an on-camera interview, citing privacy laws for students and personnel. However, they said they have been evaluating the appropriateness of the assignment since Benson’s complaint and have not reached a conclusion.
Bruce Benson said the family never brought their concerns up to the school principal before deciding to withdraw Lorena from the school after they searched online and found other people complaining about books in Wake County schools.
In Wake County, as in school districts across the country, people have complained about books in school and classroom libraries that depict transgender characters or contain passages that describe sex acts. Complaints are often driven by national conservative groups that identify books for local members to look for in their local schools.
Left-leaning groups have countered that the complaints are intended to remove depictions of LGBTQ+ characters from books and alienate any students who might be LGBTQ+.
School boards have often rejected formal challenges to assigned reading materials, noting that passages with sexual content in them are brief and don’t cause books to violate rules that they can’t be “pervasively vulgar.” Books must be considered in their entirety during challenges.
UPDATE OCT. 3: This story was updated to reflect when the school system first began looking into Benson's complaint.