‘My Duty as a Parent’: Inside the Fight to Remove Sexualized Content From School Libraries

Something on television caught the attention of Stacy Langton, a mother of six living in northern Virginia, when she was cooking dinner for her family in mid-September 2021.

“Write a sex scene you wouldn’t show your mom; write an X-rated Disney scenario,” read the TV news reporter, showing prompts given to students of a writing class at a public high school in Hudson, Ohio.

“What the heck is going on?” Langton said to herself.

All her children went to Catholic schools before high school, so she didn’t have much experience with public schools. Her eldest son had just started 11th grade at a public high school in Fairfax County in August 2021. A year earlier, he had started at this same high school but switched to a private school partway through the year to avoid remote learning policies brought about by the pandemic.