Yorkville D115 Board Being Investigated Over Book Ban, Alleged Open Meetings Act Violation

YORKVILLE, IL — Yorkville Community Unit School District 115 is under investigation for holding "improper closed sessions" about removing a book from an English curriculum and violating the Open Meetings Act, according to the Illinois Attorney General's Office.

A complaint alleges that during its May 22 and Aug. 7 meetings, the Board of Education held closed sessions that they preceded with misleading statements about the reasons for entering closed session "because they did not mention the book or curriculum matters," according to an Oct. 3 letter obtained by Patch addressed to Board of Education President Darren Crawford from Deputy Bureau Chief Joshua Jones.

The complaint also alleged the Board's meeting agendas "did not set forth the general subject matter of the Board's respective votes concerning the book," according to the letter. Jones wrote that the Public Access Bureau determined further action was warranted and requested the Board submit copies of the agendas, minutes and closed session verbatim recordings from the meetings under question.

The Illinois Attorney General's Office declined to give comment beyond providing the letter to Patch.

The book under question is Bryan Stevenson's "Just Mercy," which tells the story of the lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice that defends the wrongly condemned and those who cannot afford proper representation. It follows Stevenson's years-long efforts to free Walter McMillan, a Black man who was wrongfully convicted of murder and served on death row for almost 6 years.

In 2019, the book was adapted into a movie starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx.

The Board unanimously voted in May to allow the autobiography, published in 2014, to remain part of the curriculum of a Yorkville High School English II Rhetorical Analysis class. A parent appealed the decision, and four of six Board members voted to remove the book from the class's curriculum in August, according to reports from the Chicago Tribune.

District 115 told Patch in a statement that the Board did not ban the book but decided, after a parent complained, to direct the interim superintendents to "inform the complainant and accused that Just Mercy, by Bryan Stephenson, may no longer be used as an anchor text to teach the English II unit, but the text will remain available to interested students in the library."

"Two members of the board of education noted that the book is too controversial and would like a different text to be used, while two members suggested having multiple age appropriate titles for students to choose from," the statement read. "The Board's actions were publicly posted in Board Docs with full transparency to the community."

Officials also wrote the district "believes it has substantially complied with OMA, and no findings to the contrary have been made by the Attorney General's office at this stage."

The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois "strongly condemned" the Board's decision to remove the civil rights book from the curriculum in a letter penned Oct. 5.

"Banning books is not a practice limited to other states," Edwin Yohnka, director of communications and public policy at the ACLU of Illinois, said in a statement. "What we are seeing in Yorkville is part of a national attempt to curb reading materials based on politics and ideology, to the detriment of students and educators."