Some Merrimack Valley school board members concerned by book’s removal from required curriculum

This story was originally produced by the Concord Monitor. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative .

As an English professor at Rivier University, Sally Hirsh-Dickinson didn’t assign “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” in her college classes, but her students would often bring up the 1999 coming-of-age novel anyway.

“I would hear students being passionately enthusiastic about how significant this book was for them,” Hirsh-Dickinson said. “It’s a book that speaks to a lot of students in a lot of sensitive and meaningful ways.”

Hirsh-Dickinson, a Penacook representative to the Merrimack Valley School Board, said she was troubled by a high school committee’s decision to remove the book from the required curriculum in four tenth-grade Engli