At the December 9, 2025 Beaufort County School District Board of Education meeting, the Board addressed the agenda item 2025 South Carolina Instructional Materials Uniform Complaint Forms for the Month of February Challenging Library Books submitted by Ivie Szlai who had also submitted the original request to ban 97 books from the Beaufort County District Schools in 2022. Mike Covert also submitted a similar list of books to be banned.
As a result, the school district temporarily removed the books from the schools, formed panels of 146 parents, community members, teachers, librarians and educators to review the books and ultimately recommended that 92 of the books be returned to the schools with only five books banned and removed from the schools.
State Regulation 43-170, a new complaint form and process was approved on June 26, 2024. The regulation established consistent definitions and a threshold test for local educators and boards to determine if materials available to students in public schools are age and developmentally appropriate, aligned with the purpose of South Carolina’s instructional program and did not contain descriptions or images of sexual conduct. It also created a uniform process for local school boards to review and hold public hearings for the reconsideration of instructional materials within its district and established an appellate process to the State Board of Education. According to this regulation, complainants cannot file more than five books for reconsideration in any given calendar month.
At the August 22, 2025 Beaufort County School District Board of Education meeting, Szlai submitted a complaint form for the reconsideration of 15 books (of which 6 had already been removed from circulation due to damage or low circulation) that had already been reviewed and approved by the district be reconsidered and removed under the new State Regulation 43-170. As a result, the Board ultimately voted to restrict the nine remaining books rather so that these restricted books remain in school libraries but students may access them only with a parental signature.
At the December 9, 2025 Beaufort County School District Board of Education meeting, Szlai again submitted a complaint form under the State Regulation 43-170 for the reconsideration and removal of the following five additional books that had previously been approved by the district's review committees and the Board of Education for retention in the Beaufort County district's schools:
- The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
- Oryz and Crake by Margaret Atwood
- Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaipur
- November 9 by Colleen Hoover
- Perfect by Ellen Hopkins
During the Public Comments section of the board meeting, three individuals spoke out against removing the five books from the school district: Bernie Solaro, a retired public and private school guidance counselor; Ron Kilgore, an associate professor at the University of South Carolina, Beaufort; and Mary Foster, a Families Against Book Bans board member, educator and parent as well as a member of the original book challenge committee in 2022. All of these speakers supported the students’ right to have the continued inclusion of these books in the Beaufort Public Schools on many levels, including literary merit and their inherent value to students. In addition, it was also noted that parents already can opt their children out of reading any book they choose.
The final speaker concerning book bans was Ivie Szlai who spoke about the banning of these five books from the Beaufort Public Schools based on their sexually explicit nature as it relates to the State Regulation 43-170. Szlai presented the specific parts of the five books that she stated were in violation of State Regulation 43-170 involving descriptions or images of sexual conduct.
There were no public responses in person or by telephone on these books.
After this process was completed, the Board of Education members voted to restrict all five books with a parental signature required for a student to checkout any of these books from the school libraries.
~Linda Gustafson, Education Co-chair, League of Women Voters of Hilton Head Island-Bluffton Area
