atlanta arts tagged interest

Superintendent Chris Ragsdale has ordered the removal of dozens of books from the Cobb Country School District. But many in the community claim he has no authority to do so.

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On September 19, just in time for Banned Books Week and for the second time since the 2024–2025 school year began, Cobb County School District’s (CCSD) controversial superintendent, Chris Ragsdale, announced a slate of new book bans at a work session for the Cobb County School Board.

The six titles included five books from Sarah J. Maas’ popular A Court of Thorns and Roses series, along with David Ball’s historical novel Ironfire. Maas’ A Court of Mist and Fury, along with many of Cobb’s other banned titles, is one of the most-banned books in the country, according to the American Library Association (ALA).

There’s reason to believe the book bans in Cobb will continue. A month into the 2024–2025 school year, Ragsdale has already added 19 titles to CCSD’s list of banned books, and he has indicated that he will continue as part of a district-wide book review.

Micheal Garza, 49, and the parent of a 7-year-old daughter who attends a CCSD school, has vocally opposed the school board’s bans. “They are taking a cue from the rest of the state,” Garza says in an interview, referring to a slate of new Georgia censorship laws. “We have students who are being marginalized, and these laws are being cited as a reason,” he says.

Two 2022 laws have made it easier for Georgia schools to prohibit students’ access to books. SB 226 changed the book challenge process, giving principals power to remove challenged books from school shelves independently, without the input of teachers, parents or media specialists, as was previously required, and without notifying the public.

HB 1084, the so-called “divisive concepts” law, has attracted broader attention, in part because the Cobb County School Board used it to fire 10-year teaching veteran Katie Rinderle for reading Scott Stuart’s picture book about gender stereotypes, My Shadow Is Purple, to her fifth-grade class. Rinderle’s termination became a flashpoint in Cobb County’s censorship controversy.

The new laws have led to a rise in book bans in Georgia public schools, kicking up controversy and lawsuits in multiple districts, including Cobb County, Forsyth County and Marietta City. But Garza says the situation in Cobb, which has banned 26 books district-wide since 2023, is uniquely fraught because it’s driven by district leadership, rather than parents.

He argues that the county has used the new laws to institute censorship rules “on steroids.” “You don’t see this happening necessarily in Atlanta Public Schools,” he says. “It’s a unique thing up here in Cobb County, and it’s even gone down into Marietta City Schools, where they’ve been doing their own book banning.”

Garza is currently running as a Democrat for State House seat 46, but says he opposes CCSD’s book bans as a private citizen and a parent. “We just care about our kids’ literacy,” he says. He sees the bans as a sign of Republicans’ slipping influence in the region.

As demographics have changed, he explains, the party’s control over the region has slipped, leaving it with control over very little — including the school board: “They’ve lost all of the Cobb delegates, a lot of State House seats and State Senate seats. And they’re desperately trying to hold on to this power,” redistricting along racial lines and banning books. “That’s where the politics comes in for us parents,” he says.

Garza is one of many Cobb residents who have expressed disapproval of the district’s new attitude toward books. Teachers, parents and legal organizations have questioned whether the district has the right to remove books from schools in this way, and multiple lawsuits challenging district censorship policies are ongoing, including Rinderle’s appeal of her termination to Cobb Superior Court.

Parents decry board partisanship

In September 2023, a month after the school board fired Rinderle, Ragsdale announced CCSD’s first two book bans. By that time, Garza, who started attending school board meetings when his daughter was in pre-K, was already an active voice in opposition to the school board’s conservative majority, which he felt was not addressing the district’s real problems, including racism and bullying. “[Parents] care about a whole host of other things,” he says. “And to be talking about book bans, that just doesn’t sit well with us.” He adds: “It’s people trying to hold on to power, and our kids are in the middle.”

Laura Judge, who has two sons in Cobb schools, agrees, explaining that CCSD’s school board is partisan, a rule decided at the legislative level. Judge, who started watching school board meetings remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic, eventually decided to run for a post on the board in response to the political partisanship she saw as getting in the way of solving the district’s problems and minimizing minority-party board members’ ability to communicate with and advocate for parents.

“What a lot of people don’t know,” she explains, “is district leadership is separate from board leadership. The board members are elected, they hire the superintendent, and then the superintendent hires the people for the district.” As a result, she says, Superintendent Ragsdale — and, by extension, the board’s Republican majority — has outsized power over the district, even when his ideas are unpopular. She points to the controversy over Rinderle as a prime example.

Rinderle, who taught at Due West Elementary, was placed on administrative leave days after reading My Shadow Is Purple to her students, under a Cobb County policy based on HB 1084, according to Atlanta magazine. After Rinderle appealed her initial termination, the school board assembled a tribunal of retired teachers to hear it. However, in August 2023, after the tribunal found insufficient evidence to fire her, the school board voted 4–3 along party lines to terminate her anyway, making her the first teacher fired in relation to the law.

“That was a partisan split vote,” Judge says, suggesting that the board’s Republican members voted to support Ragsdale. She adds that Rinderle’s firing reflects the same partisanship that’s behind the book bans, alleging the partisan board is heavily influenced by the outside groups pushing for books bans nationwide, such as Libs of TikTok. Libs of TikTok is a set of social media accounts devoted to reposting online content made by left-wing and LGBTQ content creators, typically accompanied by mocking or hostile commentary.

As evidence, Judge points to the fact that many CCSD parents and community members learned about the first round of book bans through social media, when Libs of TikTok posted on Twitter/X that it had reached out to the school district about specific books in schools. The group also posted an announcement of its part in the bans on its website. “They posted it on Twitter saying, ‘We reached out to Cobb County School District, and they immediately got rid of these books.” Afterward, she says, Ragsdale announced the first round of book bans. These claims were subsequently confirmed by the Cobb County Courier.

“So that’s how the community found out,” she says, noting that state law requires that book challenges come from parents of current students. “What’s bothersome to me is that currently, policy is not being followed,” she says, alleging that Cobb’s partisan school board allows Ragsdale to make unilateral decisions about which books remain on school shelves without consulting or notifying parents.

“The Republican majority has said that [removing books] is the superintendent’s decision. That’s why they hire him, and they fully support his decision,” Judge says. What the district really needs, she argues, is more parental and community involvement in school board issues, including book challenges. “The superintendent says that he has the charge of protecting students, but there is no parental input of, ‘Hey, can I restrict these books?’”

Garza doesn’t believe the challenges come from parents, either, who he says worry more about gun violence, bullying and Cobb’s low-quality school lunches. His concerns about the school district do not extend to its teachers and school administrators, who he says do “wonderful, wonderful things.” But where district leadership is concerned, he says, “I just don’t see a huge emphasis on the things that really matter.”

Teachers intimidated by lack of transparency

Parents are not the only ones questioning CCSD’s decision-making process. Rinderle and her legal team have argued that neither state law nor county leadership provide sufficient guidance on teaching gender-related issues or determining what constitutes “harmful” or “divisive” material. Rinderle told Atlanta magazine that at her school, administrators showed teachers a PowerPoint about the law at a planning meeting but gave no additional instruction.

Other educators echo Rinderle’s claim. “When these laws came about,” says retired Cobb English teacher Dr. Diana Bishop, “we were not given any guidance by our school. We met with our department chair, and she basically told us to be careful. ‘What are divisive topics?’ ‘Really not sure.’ ‘Well, can we teach this?’ ‘I really don’t know.’ Nothing was ever put in writing from our school or from the district, saying, ‘Avoid this.’ Anything could be divisive.”

Kathy Vinyard, a retired Cobb librarian, says the lack of guidelines about the new laws create a fundamental problem for teachers and librarians choosing books: “I’m telling you, it’s hard to find current young adult fiction, teen fiction, without controversy, because that’s what they’re living.”

Teachers’ uncertainty over CCSD’s new approach to books extends to the challenge process, which has changed since Vinyard was teaching. “Every year we had to have a media committee,” she explains. “We had to have at a minimum, an administrator, a teacher, a student, a community member and a parent.” Parents or guardians wishing to have a book removed had to fill out a document formally challenging it and explaining their objections. “Then,” she says, “every person on that committee has to read in completion the book, and then you discuss and then there’s a recommendation: Keep or don’t keep.” She adds that whatever the committee decided applied only to the school where the challenge was lodged.

Now, however, she’s heard from educators still working in CCSD that administrators are pre-emptively removing certain titles from bookshelves, a phenomenon Slate reports is occurring nationwide. “They’re coming in and telling teachers, ‘If you’ve got this and this, pull them.’” This is a significant change facilitated by SSB 226, which allows principals to pull books of their own volition.

In the past, Vinyard says, administrators tended to give educators the benefit of the doubt when it came to book lists, “understanding that a professional wasn’t going to go off the hinges and do something crazy” because they knew the rules, and the rules were clear. Now, she says, the administrators at her old school have told teachers, “’We will not back you. If you have students reading something and there’s a complaint, you’re on your own.’”

She blames this attitudinal shift, which she traces to Rinderle’s firing, on the volatile climate around books in the district. “They sure didn’t have that teacher’s back,” she says, noting that Rinderle bought My Shadow Is Purple at her school’s Scholastic book fair.

The vague new rules and lack of institutional support directly led to Bishop’s decision to retire. “Basically,” she explains, “I decided it was just too much, to have gone through the pandemic and to have felt unsupported by our district, then to have these bans, see what happened to Rinderle.” She adds, “In order to do the job the way I feel it needs to be done, I will get into trouble. As close as I was to be being able to qualify for retirement, I was like, ‘It’s not worth it.’”

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Rachel Wright has a Ph.D. from Georgia State University and an MA from the University College Dublin, both in creative writing. Her work has appeared in The Stinging Fly and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel.