Texas school fires teacher for reading explicit version of Anne Frank's diary to students

A middle school teacher was forced to leave her job at a middle school after she instructed eighth-grade students to read a controversial excerpt from the illustrated adaptation of 'Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.' On Wednesday, the Hampshire-Fannett Independent School District fired the educator for reading the “unapproved” book in class. 

According to the New York Post, the passage was a diary entry from Frank in which she mentioned male and female genitalia. While the explicit entry was removed from old versions of her book that are used in history lessons on the Holocaust, the comic book version published in 2018 contains it. 

School district ceases reading of Anne Frank's Diary

A parent of twins in the class told a local station in Texas that her sons returned home and informed her that the teacher told them to read the passage in class. “I mean it’s bad enough, she’s having them read this for an assignment, but then she also is making them read it aloud and making a little girl talk about feeling each other’s breasts and when she sees a female she goes into ecstasy, that’s not OK,”  Amy Manuel said.

On Tuesday, the school district emailed parents to address the mistake. “It was brought to the administration’s attention tonight that 8th grade students were reading content that was not appropriate. “The reading of that content will cease immediately. Your student’s teacher will communicate her apologies to you and your students soon, as she has expressed those apologies to us," the email read, according to TV station KFDM. 

It added that the district is looking for a "high-quality, full-time" replacement for the teacher and has launched an investigation into the matter. The district claimed that it never approved the lesson in the first place. But this isn't the first time that the book has stoked controversy at educational institutions. Last year, Texas’ Dallas-Fort Worth’s Keller Independent School District removed it from libraries.