Spotswood High School (Virginia)
The committee completed its report during the 1976-1977 school year, and later revised it when a specific starting date for construction was established.Specific plans for names, nicknames, and colors were developed by a committee of nine persons that made final reports to the School Board in December 1978.[2] In 2008, the student population was approaching 1500, but after the new East Rockingham High School opened in 2009, the overcrowding problem was alleviated temporarily.[citation needed] In 2007, 2008, and 2009 the boys cross country team captured the Massanutten District and Region III titles and placed 7th, 4th, and 2nd respectively in the state.In the 2010-2011, the Blazers surprised many people by repeating their performance the previous year with a District Tournament Title, being Region III Runners-up, and again making an appearance to the VHSL Division 3 "Final Four".[5] Spotswood made headlines briefly in 2000, when teacher Jeff Newton, with the backing of freedom of speech advocacy organizations including the ACLU and American Library Association, went to court over an incident covering several weeks in September 1999, when then principal C. James Slye ordered Newton to remove anticensorship pamphlets from his classroom's door that had been posted in observance of Banned Books Week.The pamphlet in question was a list of books that had been challenged or banned in schools, libraries and bookstores around the country during the late 1990s; these books include several revered and widely read American works, such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Color Purple, Of Mice and Men and Death of a Salesman, but also include highly sexualized or "vulgar" books that the US Supreme Court found legal to exclude from public schools in the 1982 case of Board of Education v. Pico.ALA | Challenged and Banned Books The ACLU charged that Spotswood was effectively censoring the anticensorship message of the pamphlet outside of his constitutional rights and blatantly failed to follow the Rockingham County School Board Policy for mediating issues related to controversial and sensitive materials.