RICHLAND -- The Richland School Board has reversed last month's decision to ban the use of a young-adult novel by a popular Northwest author in classrooms.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie now is cleared for any grade level in Richland high schools.

The board Monday voted 4-1 to allow Alexie's novel back into schools. Phyllis Strickler this time was the lone dissenter.

On June 14, the board voted 3-2 to remove the book from the district's reading lists. At that time, Mary Guay and Rick Donahoe joined Strickler in voting against Absolutely True.

That had been a mistake, Guay and Donahoe said Monday.

And the board is allowed to revisit a vote when a member who voted with the majority asks for a redo, said Richard Jansons, the board president.

None of the board members had read Absolutely True when they first voted on it. That was the job of the Instructional Materials Committee, or IMC, established a little more than a year ago to review all books used in Richland schools.

Guay and Donahoe thought that the entire IMC read the book before its members gave it mixed reviews last month.

But to speed up the process, IMC members split up in groups. Each group reads a particular book and then shares its findings with the rest of the members.

Once Guay and Donahoe found out that only part of the committee had read the book, they wanted to revisit their votes against it.

"That was my misunderstanding," Donahoe said Monday.

He read the book two days after the June 14 meeting and found it to be "outstanding," he said.

The book is based on Alexie's own upbringing on the Spokane reservation and his attending school in nearby Reardan, a predominantly white farming town.

The book's 14-year-old protagonist struggles with poverty, racism and death.

Those themes, and particularly the main character's perseverance in the face of these challenges, bear important lessons for students, Donahoe said.

"When I'm voting a book out of the classroom, I'm denying parents the right to choose to have that book read by their students," he said.

In the future, he will read every book he will vote on, Donahoe said.

So will the other member who switched her vote from the one she cast four weeks ago.

"I made a big mistake," Guay said. "I will be getting every book we vote on."

Her original vote and its reversal had nothing to do with her facing a challenger in the upcoming school board elections who is an IMC member, Guay said.

All members of the board had read Absolutely True by Monday.

But Jansons said that couldn't be expected to happen for each book -- that's what the IMC is there for.

The district has about 70 books left to review and has given itself six to nine months to do it, he said.

"If the expectation is that (the board) read every one, that's going to take me a while," Jansons said. "But I won't vote to remove a book from the selection before I read it."

Most who spoke up during public input on the book issue appeared to be in favor of allowing the novel in the schools.

Kim Maldonado, a teacher at Hanford High School, said she had thought about using Absolutely True in a 10th-grade support class she taught two years ago.

Her class included mostly "kids from tough backgrounds," Maldonado said. Among them was a Native American youth, whom she asked to review the book before she gave it to the whole class.

"He read it five times," Maldonado said. "It changed his life. It made him understand his heritage and his issues with his father."

The book taught the children in her class that they can get out of the tough situations they were in, she said.

And the character's journey through high school teaches kids that education can better their lives, she said.

Others in support of Alexie's book said that negative reviews focused too much on the few harrowing situations described in it and too little on its overall message of hope and humor.

Two in the small crowd stood to speak out against the novel.

David Garber read from a Wall Street Journal article critical of coarse themes and language in young-adult novels that names Absolutely True as an example. Garber is a member of the IMC and of a group that rates novels based on how much of their contents it finds offensive.

Dave Hedengren questioned if board members lost the ability to know when a book went "over the mark," and equated some of the books taught in Richland schools with internet pornography, which is electronically blocked from school computers.

The district cannot meet the exact standards of every parent in its votes on novels, which is why the last say over what a student reads is with the parent, Jansons said.

"That's why we have the opt-out policy," he said. "I trust the process we're using."

-- Jacques Von Lunen: 582-1402; jvonlunen@tricityherald.com