Riverside County Pulls Dictionaries Off School Shelves For 'Oral Sex'

When we first saw the headline we thought,"They need to get new hobbies in Texas." But alas, it's Riverside County, which is like Texas only backwards and Sierra Nevada adjacent. But no, it's Riverside County. The last national story about the area east of LA, was when a Republican women's group president sent out a picture of then candidate Barack Obama on food stamps with watermelon and Kool-Aid in their monthly newsletter. Now, they've pulled dictionaries for - wait for it - having a word in it. LAT David Kelly writes: "The dictionaries have not been banned," said Betti Cadmus, a spokeswoman for the Menifee Union School District in conservative southwest Riverside County on Monday. "There was a growing concern by parents that some of the words were not age-appropriate." A panel of parents, teachers and administrators will meet later this week to comb the dictionary for potentially graphic words or definitions and issue a report within a month. "They will determine the extent to which the dictionaries support the curriculum, the age appropriateness of the materials and its suitability for the age levels of the students," Cadmus said. "It's not going to be an arbitrary decision." Read the whole story here. CORRECTION: We got our "somewhere east of here" geography wrong points out Gary Scott. The original post said that the food stamp mailer was also in Riverside County. Scott sent us this note: As a native of Riverside County, I must come to the county's defense (sort of). The watermelon incident referred to in the post about banning the dictionary (as if anyone still reads them) actually took place in San Bernardino County, not in Riverside County. Once upon a time (roughly a year ago), the Riverside Press-Enterprise actually covered both counties, which is why the watermelon story was covered in that paper. Recent layoffs have changed that.

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Riverside County Pulls Dictionaries Off School Shelves For 'Oral Sex'

Tina Dupuy

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Tina Dupuy