“Oh, my God,” one member of the Brainerd, MN school board muttered under his breath as Sherry Weltze read aloud from a book in their middle-school library. Maybe a little more God is what this school board needs, or perhaps just a dose of parental control. Seven presenters, including Weltze, took turns reading material available to students from the fifth through eighth grades, provided by the district.

Alpha News took video of Weltze’s contribution, a reading from What Girls Are Made Of by Elana K. Arnold, although one could easily mistake it as an entry from Penthouse Forum back in the day. Need I add the Not Safe for Work (NSFW) tag? Making this all the more humiliating is the retired grandmother’s dispassionate recitation, which had to have ramped up the humiliation factor to 11 on the Spinal Tap amplifier:

EXPLICIT: A former Crow Wing County teacher reads from a book available to middle-school students. “Oh my God,” one school board member whispers under his breath. pic.twitter.com/zq1KeN6S1Y

— Alpha News (@AlphaNewsMN) June 19, 2023

The excerpts she read detailed a girl’s sexual encounters with her boyfriend. The book graphically describes oral sex, saying if the girl is on her period, then she suggests that she “give him head.”

“I laid a towel on the sheet in case I bled, and then I watch Seth roll the condom over his penis,” the book reads. “I watched him maneuver his latex-wrapped erection as he pushed and tried to get inside.”

How can anyone think this is appropriate material for 10-year-olds? Even a 14-year-old doesn’t need to access this kind of material, let alone in a school library.

Brainerd is a smallish community in northern Minnesota best known as the claimed home of Paul Bunyan, Babe the Blue Ox, and (more famously) one of the settings for the film Fargo. This is far from the progressive core of Minneapolis and St. Paul, a place where one would least expect to find such filth in a middle-school library. The community appears shocked and angry to discover it there, as Alpha News reports in its follow-up, and at least this time a school board took notice:

When Kevin Boyles, the board chair, attempted to move on from the public comment without addressing the concerns, Dondelinger told him to “hold on a second.”

He told Boyles that he would like to make a motion to discuss the book at the next board meeting.

“Something needs to be done,” Dondelinger said. “I’m shocked. We need to dig in and find out what the hell’s going on.”

He then proceeded to ask if “this stuff is accessible to fifth graders” and was told by the room of concerned citizens that yes, it was.

That’s at least a good start. Better yet, the board should ask what led the school library and its administrators to add material like this to bookshelves that cater to younger readers. What possible educational purpose for 10-14-year-olds could there be in material that includes explicit sexual acts?

One has to wonder whether this and other such occurrences aren’t attempts to groom children for later sexual exploitation. Exposing children to sexually explicit material is a well-known technique of groomers. The effort to push back on reasonable curation of material for minors as “book banning” attempts to distract from this core question whenever this pops up. It’s a well-worn dodge at this point to evade questions about the intent of sexualizing children through drag shows, dirty books, and genderqueer indoctrination that have all targeted elementary and middle-school children over the last several years.

Parents have had enough. It’s time to hold officials accountable for their negligence or malice, first in public meetings like this, then at the ballot box, and at some point perhaps in court. Sherry Weltze just gave Brainerd and parents across America a real education about public schools.