If you want to keep visceral discussions of rape out of our high school classrooms, you must make your voice heard. Sign this petition if you live in St. Michael or Albertville or open enroll in the district.

Fifteen-year-old students in St. Michael-Albertville (STMA) schools are required to read Speak, a book by author Laurie Halse Anderson which contains visceral depictions of sexual assault.

Speak is marketed as a young adult novel targeted toward teenagers. It has received many accolades and awards and was a New York Times best-seller, largely because of its depiction of a thirteen-year-old girl who becomes the victim of sexual assault. Of course, that term greatly softens the reality. She is brutally raped in its pages, and readers get to vicariously share in that experience.

Along with explicit depictions of sexual assault and self-harm, the book presents a dreary, nihilistic view of institutions and authority figures. Miranda, the thirteen-year-old protagonist, is failed by nearly everyone around her. Her parents, teachers, school administrators, friends and classmates are all cartoonishly cruel, self-centered, and incompetent. Even if you took the depictions of sexual assault out of it, Speak would be devoid of any academic or literary value.

Many parents have commented on how poorly written it is. It meanders through the irrelevant minutiae of Miranda's seemingly un-curated thought life, providing brief, blunt, and wholly disjointed glimpses into her experience as a high school student. The objection to including the book in a high school curriculum boils down to this: it is not a book worthy of academic study, and it presents depictions which are inappropriate for its audience.

Concerned parents have petitioned the school board to remove the book at three separate meetings. A process has been initiated to review the book's inclusion in the curriculum. But teachers have rallied political support for keeping the book.

If we want to keep visceral discussions of rape out of our high school classrooms, we have to make our voices heard.

Please, if you live in St. Michael or Albertville, or if you open enroll or otherwise have a stake in the school district, sign our petition asking the STMA school board to protect current and future students from having to engage with this deeply inappropriate content. Thank you!

Read more about the effort to protect our students here:
Minnesota Parents Spoke Out Against Sexually Explicit Reading Material, but Teachers Fought Back