MCKINNEY — Election tensions continued to build at a McKinney Independent School District (MISD) Board of Trustees meeting Tuesday, where battle lines have been drawn on numerous topics, especially over library books that some consider to be inappropriate for children.
Early voting has already started, and three seats on MISD’s Board of Trustees are up for grabs. Amy Dankel, board president and incumbent for Place 4, is running against Brittany Hendrickson. Lynn Sperry, the incumbent, faces a challenge against Rachel Elliot for Place 5, and Stephanie O’Dell, secretary, an incumbent, faces challengers Jim Westerheid and Serena Ashcroft for Place 6.
Some of the 30 speakers at Tuesday’s meeting spoke out against certain library books they alleged were either too sexually explicit for students or promoted certain gender ideologies.
Roger Wheelock, president of Greater Than I Ministries, called some of the books at the school “pornography.”
“When you read these things, you don’t even want to read them,” Wheelock said to The Dallas Express. “You read one sentence and you want to put them down.”
Wheelock provided The Dallas Express with a link to a list of 153 books he and others claim are too sexually explicit to be available to children.
Some of the books, which the document suggested would receive an NC-17 movie rating if put to film, included Push by Sapphire, Sold by Patricia McCormack, Lucky by Alice Sebold, and Tricks by Ellen Hopkins.
Other books included on the list were Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, the Assassination Classroom Japanese comic book series, and Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk.
In a follow-up email to The Dallas Express, Wheelock said he wanted to see these books given some kind of warning label.
MISD parent Samuel Hall told The Dallas Express that the issue of “pornographic” books in school libraries was a sticking point for him and others who recently became interested in school board politics.
“It all made us very upset,” Hall said.
As previously reported in The Dallas Express, Hall had recently won an administrative ruling that allowed him back onto MISD property. He had been issued a criminal trespass warning by a school resource officer last year while trying to attend a school board meeting.
Still, others at Tuesday’s meeting voiced opposition to the premise that some of the library books in question were pornographic and claimed that some of the people in attendance raising the issue were trying to push a “Christian nationalist agenda.”
Phyllis Tippit, who spoke during the public comment section of the board of trustees meeting, told The Dallas Express that some of the school board attendees come from a “specific religious viewpoint.”
“They frequently talk about how God wants this or God wants that,” she said, claiming that at a previous meeting, somebody read aloud from the Book of Revelations and said that the school board would be condemned to the lake of fire.
Tippit, a reverend at a local Presbyterian church, said that while she is a Christian, she believes public education is for everybody.
“We teach history the best we can. We teach science as science, and we don’t explore whether science and the Bible agree with each other. That’s not the job of the public school,” she said.
Terry Markoff also spoke during the school board meeting and claimed that the district’s academics had begun to slip under the current school board’s leadership.
The district’s latest accountability report by the Texas Education Agency noted that only 62% of MISD students scored at grade level on their STAAR exams. However, these scores still put MISD ahead of the troubled Dallas Independent School District, where only 41% of students scored at grade level on the STAAR and nearly 20% of the last year’s graduating class did not earn a diploma in four years.
Markoff also took issue with “pornography in the high schools” and books that he said encourage children to be transgender.
“And there’s books promoting transgenderism to our youngest learners — good God,” he said. “Your defense, as it has often been, that hateful speech and false accusations and bullying is your method for dealing with those who speak up against your agenda. We just want the book off the bookshelves.”
