| In a small Missouri town, a campaign to remove literature from the high-school library forced members of the community to reckon with the meaning of “parents’ rights.”  Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker; Source photographs by Getty. The renewed push to ban books or severely limit access to them in schools and public libraries has caught many parents and educators off guard. For Tamara Yancy, a substitute teacher and mother of three in the growing town of Nixa, Missouri, the tactic felt like a relic of an earlier, settled culture war. “I didn’t even know that in this day and age that was a thing, or that anyone would consider banning a book for any reason,” she tells Sue Halpern, who reports from Nixa about how a fight over challenged books in the high-school library pitted the local school board against the community’s own students. Three hundred and forty students signed a petition opposing the removal of books; and then the board did it anyway. As one board member explained it, “I’ve got to think that the majority of people, myself included, are doing it with the best interests of the students, and protecting their minds.” Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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