Bob Graham Education Center, a K-8 school in Miami-Dade County, restricted access to Amanda Gorman’s acclaimed poem “The Hill We Climb,” which she read at President Biden’s inauguration, for elementary-aged students after a parent issued a formal complaint on the grounds that the poem was “not educational” and included indirect “hate messages.”
A committee reviewed “The Hill We Climb” based on a single complaint, provided to The Times by the Florida Freedom to Read Project, a parent-driven organization defending student access to information and ideas.
Daily Salinas of Miami Lakes, Fla., the mother of two Bob Graham students, filed the complaint in March and asked that the poem be removed from the “total environment” rather than just age-restricted, writing that the poem was “not for schools” as it would “cause confusion and indoctrinate students.”
When asked if she was aware of professional reviews of the National Youth Poet Laureate’s poem, Salinas wrote, “I don’t need it.” And when asked to list the author, she wrote Oprah Winfrey. (Winfrey wrote the forward for the book version of the poem published in March 2021.)
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Article URL : https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2023-05-23/amanda-gormans-inaugural-poem-book-bans