SOMERSET COUNTY, Md.—When Matt Lankford became school board chair, he told parents that he was not banning books. His aim, he said, was to remove inappropriate and vulgar material from classrooms.
Then he proposed a policy for the “selection and weeding” of all reading materials to remove “negative or destructive character traits” like victimhood, rebellion, profanity, vulgarity, gang activity, drugs, alcohol, sexuality, and “anti-religion.”
“Depending on how you’re looking at a book, you could make an argument for almost any book to be excluded from their library collection,” Jacob Gerding, the president-elect of the Maryland Association of School Librarians, said of the plan. “In the state of Maryland, absolutely this is the most far-reaching and the most extensive [policy] I’ve seen.”
It may also violate Maryland’s Freedom to Read Act, according to Maryland’s inspector general for education. But the response from Lankford has been defiant.
“It’s not that I want to remove books, or inhibit children from reading their books,” he told Capital News Service. “But I want to have, at least, suitable books.”
The board has, so far, refused to change its policies or address the inspector general’s concerns, according to Lankford’s response to him.
It’s an acrimonious loop. The board can’t act on its policy until the superintendent writes a procedure for them to follow, and she hasn’t done so. She’s tried to get Lankford removed from office, and vice versa. Meanwhile, the future of school reading material is up in the air. Parents worry that the schools are headed toward dysfunction.
Across the country, school boards are among several fronts in the American culture war. In this small county on the eastern shore, many residents just want their school board to focus on making the schools work.
“You can be MAGA, you can be Republican, you can be Democrat, you can be white, Black, Mexican, whatever you wanna be,” said Joe Hylton, who has three kids in the Somerset school district. “But when it comes to our kids’ education, we should all be one.”
In recent months, parents have grown increasingly frustrated, some about the book policy, and others about the board’s inattention to the schools’ basic needs.
“My kids have been in Somerset County schools their entire lives,” said Amy Davenport, a local woman, in an interview. “They’ve never come to me once and said, ‘Oh, Mom, there’s a book that’s disturbing me.’”
The board, Davenport said, should reprioritize. “We want to hear, what are you doing for the teachers?” she said. “What are you doing about the ELA [English Language Arts] curriculum? What are you doing about the budget?”
Lankford’s long battle against books
Lankford grew up in Somerset County and went to work as an insurance agent. He first became concerned about inappropriate materials in school books as a parent with three children in the Somerset County schools.
When Lankford’s youngest child was attending high school a few years ago, Lankford decided to read the books assigned by his English teacher.
Several books, including “All American Boys,” troubled him. There was drug use, alcohol use, and profanity, he said. The book tells the story of a Black boy beaten by a police officer and a white boy who witnessed the incident. It was “very anti-police,” Lankford said.
In a letter to the school board, posted on his Facebook page, Lankford said he didn’t want his children taught about sexual orientation, discrimination, racism, anti-racism, equality, Marxism, communism, collective responsibility, reparations, or victimhood.
Between 2020 and 2025, Lankford appeared as a private citizen before the school board at least 15 times, according to a CNS review of school board agendas, recordings, documents and other data. Almost every time, he discussed the suitability of books in school libraries, even preparing presentations that contained graphic audio from materials he said should be removed from schools.
“All American Boys,” came up a lot. So did “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” a memoir and coming-of-age story about the author’s experiences as a queer Black man.
Then, in 2023, he launched a successful campaign for the school board, becoming the leader of a group that often votes as a bloc. As chair, Lankford has pledged to get rid of vulgarity and profanity in schools.
He says that decision stemmed from a desire to follow federal law, rather than his personal beliefs. “I have not imposed any of those things since being on the board,” he told CNS.
At board meetings, he has spoken about the importance of local rule and has criticized the state’s attempts to regulate the school district. Instead, he agreed to enforce the anti-DEI policy proposed by President Donald Trump’s administration.
In March, Lankford led a school board discussion about using the beliefs in President Trump’s 2025 executive order, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling”, as a “lens” through which to interpret school policy. The order criticized “gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology” in schools.
Some locals agree with the policies Lankford champions. In an interview, Tammy Truitt, the chair of the county’s Republican central committee, pointed to the school system’s poor test scores as evidence that recent board changes were necessary.
In 2024, the school district had the second-highest improvement in English language arts proficiency on the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program, a standardized test administered to students across the state. But that improved number was still the second-lowest in Maryland. Only 10 percent of Somerset students were proficient in math, the lowest in the state.
“Our school board was just elected in landslide elections,” she said. “That was for a reason. Our school system has not focused on educating the kids.”
Lankford says he’s trying to address that. But his efforts have put him in conflict with the school district’s administrators.
In May, Somerset Superintendent Ava Tasker-Mitchell asked the Maryland State Board of Education to remove Lankford from the board. A month later, the Somerset County Board of Education attempted to fire Tasker-Mitchell, only to have the decision paused by the Maryland state superintendent of schools.
In early October, the state board of education declined to remove Lankford from the board, but admonished him for his conduct and behavior toward Tasker-Mitchell. On the same day, it said that the local board hadn’t followed the proper procedures to terminate Tasker-Mitchell, and remanded her firing back to the local board.
“I think they are intimidated by the superintendent because she is an educated black woman and she knows her stuff,” Davenport, a Somerset County parent, said. “She’s had 20 plus years of experience. And they disrespect and shoot her down every time.”
Tasker-Mitchell did not respond to requests for comment from CNS.
Frustrations between Lankford and school administration reached a breaking point in late summer, after Lankford and another board member refused to sign off on the purchase of an English curriculum, complaining that they hadn’t had enough time to review the curriculum’s content.
Administrators in the district had consulted with experts, piloted two different curricula, selected the one that teachers preferred, and applied for a grant that would fund their purchase, board records and recordings show. The money was made available in May, but for several months, the board refused to sign off on the purchase.
In late July, the state’s inspector general for education, Rick Henry, sent a warning to the school district. He told them they needed to make a decision—or risk losing a $10.5 million grant from the state, along with other educational funding, if it did not select a curriculum by August 30.
“Knowing that the school system was about to open, and not knowing what the status was going to be of their library media policy . . . or their library staff, and what their policy was . . . even for books . . . or if books were going to be available,” Henry told CNS. “We just thought it was urgent.”
The letter led to a blowup that played out in public, right before school started.
Vetting “educationally unsuitable materials”
It was August, the cusp of a new school year. The children would be back in classrooms in a week, and teachers still didn’t know what the English curriculum would be. Worried parents showed up for the board’s monthly meeting.
The school district had spent the past year testing out two different curricula, and administrators had been planning to pick a new one back in the spring. They’d even secured the state grant to implement it. All it needed was the board’s sign-off.
But Lankford kicked off the discussion by making it clear he still wasn’t ready to give full and unconditional approval. He declared that school leadership staff, including the school superintendent, had used “clandestine actions and decisions” to hide the grant, and the curriculum selection process, from the board.
After Lankford spoke, Superintendent Tasker-Mitchell grabbed a mic to interject. “I’d like to address some of the things you said,” she told Lankford.
“No, ma’am,” Lankford responded. “This is not up for discussion.” When Tasker-Mitchell continued speaking, Lankford banged his gavel repeatedly, drowning out her voice.
Lankford said that the curriculum that the teachers preferred, produced by a company called Savvas, contained “vulgarness and educationally unsuitable materials.” As an example, he pointed to “All American Boys,” the same novel he’d complained about almost five years ago when he was just a concerned constituent.
“That has 60 f-bombs in it,” he said.
The English language arts supervisor for the school district asked Lankford if he knew whether the book was included in the Savvas core curriculum. When he replied “Yes,” she shook her head. “No, sir,” she said. The book was only an optional offering.
At the end of the night, the board members voted to purchase the other curriculum – but only for a year. The grant funding was for three years of curriculum, an administrator had noted earlier in the night. By purchasing one year, she said, the school system lost out on savings offered for a multi-year purchase.
But Lankford vowed to make sure that the materials assigned in the curriculum are in line with local standards. Those include, he says, those outlined in the book selection policy.
Their vetting could be problematic. That process, along with the district’s new media policy, may violate students’ free speech rights, according to Henry, the state inspector general.
But the board has yet to implement the policy, and they haven’t removed any books from the shelves.
Lankford told CNS that the board can’t curate school libraries until Tasker-Mitchell develops a procedure for the board to do so. “She’s not been very cooperative in trying to do some of the things we’ve asked her to do,” he said, of the yet-undeveloped procedure.
Henry’s office won’t take any action until the school board actually bans a book. So for now, they’re at a standoff.
“We’re waiting, right now, for the first incident to happen,” said Henry. “And in that case, then we’ll determine what our next steps are going to be.”