Editor's note: This report is about suicide and suicidal ideation.
The South Orange & Maplewood community in New Jersey has been through some very tough times. Schools superintendent Jason Bing says at least five young people enrolled at the public Columbia High School (CHS) have attempted to die by suicide this year. In December, one CHS student died in an accident; another young person, enrolled at a private school but known to many CHS students, died by suicide the same month.
The School District of South Orange & Maplewood's most immediate response to this mental health crisis: it removed Junot Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao from a high-level English class at CHS, which serves the suburban towns of South Orange & Maplewood about 15 miles west of New York City. After pushback from parents and students, the district said that parents could sign a permission form to allow their children to study the novel in class – a scenario which PEN America, the group dedicated to free expression, still classifies as a "book ban." The district also said it plans to implement an opt-in mental health screening for all CHS students, as well as shore up its current mental health offerings.
In an interview this week, Bing said administrators - not parents - requested the removal of Díaz's novel from an Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition class taught by longtime CHS teacher Lori Martling. He declined to say who instigated the removal but defended it as part of a broader response to a five-alarm fire of mental health issues among students. The removal was first reported by CHS student journalist Ella Levy for the local news website The Village Green.
Book restrictions in schools and libraries are often linked to objections to their treatments of sexuality or to their discussions of race. But the situation in New Jersey is part of a much larger trend, according to PEN America. In a Nov. 2024 report, the group found nearly 60% of banned books are young adult titles that specifically depict grief, death, suicide, substance abuse, depression and other mental health concerns, and sexual violence. Books restricted for mental health themes include Jay Asher's young adult novel Thirteen Reasons Why, Stephen Chbosky's novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and Jodi Picoult's novel 19 Minutes.
This novel makes us 'aware of all the different dictatorships in our lives'
CHS teachers note that the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which has since been named one of The New York Times' 100 best books of the 21st century, has been part of the district's curriculum since 2011. Lori Martling has been teaching it since then, in both her AP Lit class and in a Gender Identity Across Literature honors class that she also teaches. (One of my own children went to CHS and took AP Lit with Martling, with whom my child read Oscar Wao.)
"There's so much richness to this novel," Martling said of Oscar Wao, which follows the life of its title character through youth and young adulthood, in both the United States and the Dominican Republic. "It gives voice to the Hispanic diaspora – not just talking about the story of the Dominican people, but those cultural conflicts of someone who's second generation or first generation."
"I think the novel does an amazing job of explaining and making us aware of all the different dictatorships that exist in our lives," Martling continued. "The most literal ones, in the form of someone like [former Dominican dictator Rafael] Trujillo, but also those that are more figurative – the cultural norms. The degree of misogyny that both men and women face in their day-to-day struggles. The idea of trying to fit in and feeling othered, and how to process that. The mental health struggles that I think have become more and more commonplace, particularly for young adults who are watching the world around them explode and feeling frustrated and to some degree powerless to make things right."
But the South Orange & Maplewood school district took issue with a scene in the book in which the title character attempts suicide. Given the climate in the community, Bing said, the district felt moved to immediately recall Díaz's book, which had already been distributed from the CHS library to Martling's students.
The two towns are the kinds of places where "Hate Has No Home Here" banners flutter in many yards. The local school board passed its own "Right to Read" resolution in June 2023 – not because of any threat of bans, but just on principle, before New Jersey signed a state-wide "Freedom to Read" law in Dec. 2024 that addresses content in school libraries.
Many families move to this community specifically because of its diversity: As of the 2023-24 school year, the district's student racial makeup was 50.3% white, 30.4% Black, 8.5% Hispanic, 6.9% two or more races and 3.7% Asian. High-achieving students from Columbia High School regularly go on to some of the nation's top universities and colleges – the kind of students who take Lori Martling's AP Literature class their senior year.
According to Bing, the mental health crisis at CHS is taking place among the students enrolled in AP and honors classes. Last Thursday, after news of the restriction of Oscar Wao spread across the community, the district released a 19-page report to CHS parents titled "Mental Health Data and Concerns 25-26," which it also sent to NPR.
"From our perspective," Bing said, removing Oscar Wao is "a curriculum choice that's meeting the needs of these specific kids at this specific time. What I did say to our parents is that it's the right book. It's just the wrong time with what's happening."
'The impulse to protect students' vs. 'the creep to ban anything that makes people uncomfortable'
What's happening in this New Jersey school district is part of a national trend in books being removed purportedly to safeguard students' mental health, said Kasey Meehan, the program director for the Freedom to Read initiative at PEN America.
Meehan pointed to examples like Jay Asher's young adult novel Thirteen Reasons Why, which includes suicide, sexual explicitness, drugs, alcohol and smoking. Meehan noted that mental health defenses for book restrictions are far more common for YA titles like Thirteen Reasons Why than for adult literary fiction, such as The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
"I think the impulse to protect students is valid," Meehan said. "If there's a crisis happening in this district, I could see this impulse to ensure students have safe environments."
"But over and over again," Meehan continued, "what we hear is the impulse to protect is actually quite harmful when it removes the opportunity for students to learn, when it removes the opportunity for students to be supported. In this case, it's removing the opportunity to offer a kind of mental health literacy to students that may actually need some language to talk about what they're feeling."
Meehan said that PEN America has been seeing what she calls a "creep" in book restrictions across the country. She said that when PEN began tracking such bans and suppressions, "it was mostly books with characters of color, books that talked about race and racism. But increasingly, what we've seen in this book ban crisis is the creep to ban anything that makes people uncomfortable. Now, we have many books that have been removed that talk about grief, that talk about death, that talk about substance abuse, that talk about suicide."
The South Orange & Maplewood district rejected claims from students and families that Oscar Wao has been banned just because it was removed from the curriculum; the book is still in the school library, Bing said. Meehan pointed to PEN America's definition of a book ban, which says that any restriction on access is a ban. The American Library Association uses a similar definition for "bans," including curriculum removals.
'I resist the idea that there's something supremely dangerous about art'
The author of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz, told NPR in an interview: "I generally resist the idea that there's something supremely deterministic, or supremely dangerous, about art. I just find that always to be coming out of a perspective that willfully misunderstands art – and the way that art in fact holds people in conversations, acts to limit or to reduce the sense of isolation and loneliness, that it raises difficult topics in order to deepen our understanding and build up our resilience."
Martling said that has been her experience in the classroom. "When someone is struggling," she said, "it is oftentimes literature that brings them a sense of connection, that allows them to process their thoughts and their feelings, to reach a greater sense of understanding and an ability to move forward."
Díaz said that he is sensitive to the community's tragedies, both as an author and as an educator, but removing any literature was not the way to go. "I don't want to be facile," he said, "but I think that subtracting arts from young people seems like a very strange way around it. Many of these schools are impossibly competitive – impossibly and fantastically cruel."
Student Ellie Tamir-Hoehn, who is a current AP Lit student with Martling, helped organize a petition to reinstate the novel. It was signed by all 47 students in Martling's AP Lit class and over 200 other students and alumni.
Tamir-Hoehn said that she is puzzled why the district believed it was better for students to read Oscar Wao on their own rather than in the more structured setting of a classroom. "Having the opportunity to read this book outside of class without any guidance allows for more freedom of exploration of the ideas of suicide," she said, "rather than in a constructive environment."
One of Martling's students in the Gender Identity Across Literature class, Olivia Witte, was another organizer of the response and said that the teacher approaches Diaz's work and other novels in the class with sensitivity. "Ms. Martling said to us right from the beginning of the school year, 'Several of the books we will be reading in this class are going to contain very sensitive material that may be traumatic for some students. And if you feel that it is bringing out feelings that you do not wish to talk about or discuss in class, I will provide you with an alternate read and whatever resources that you need,'" Witte recalled. "She has been so incredibly supportive."
Students said that they have also suggested bringing social workers or other mental health professionals be present for classroom discussions of Oscar Wao to provide extra support.
Bing told NPR that particular suggestion was a non-starter. "Should any book that we are doing in the curriculum require social workers and counselors to scaffold? My answer to that would be no, plain and simple," Bing said.
CHS students have also asked why other works that not just mention suicide and suicidal ideation, but actively romanticize them, remain in the high school's curriculum. These include Shakespeare's plays Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet as well as Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment.
PEN America's Meehan said that such unilateral decisions diminish both educators and students. "With this kind of decision and with similar decisions in other districts, it's undermining educator expertise and the voice of students who have valid reasons to engage with the book, and have really thoughtful recommendations on how to engage in a way that feels supported and safe for them," Meehan said.
After widespread outcry from students and parents, the district has retreated from its initial stance, but it is still limiting access to Oscar Wao in the classroom. After a series of meetings with parents last week, the administration offered CHS parents the option to grant permission for their children to read Oscar Wao.
Earlier this week, the district told NPR that it plans to have the book available to students whose parents have given consent by early March.
If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide, you can dial or text 988 and be connected to help.
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