Susan H. Black, United States District Judge

I. Undisputed Facts

the Court makes the following findings of fact.

From approximately 1975 to the present, Columbia High School has offered a two-semester course entitled "Humanities to 1500" to its students. In 1985, the school designed the course for eleventh- or twelfth-grade students, and prescribed as textbooks Volumes I and II of The Humanities: Cultural Roots and Continuities (M. Witt, et al. ed. 1980) [hereinafter "Humanities"]. In the previous  [**2]  year, the Florida Department of Education had approved these textbooks for humanities courses and placed them on its Catalog of State-Adopted Instructional Materials for secondary school students.

Among the selections in Volume I of Humanities are English translations of the play Lysistrata, written by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes in approximately 411 B.C., and the narrative poem The Miller's Tale, written by the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer in approximately 1380 A.D. Although neither Lysistrata nor The Miller's Tale were required or assigned reading in the humanities course, a portion of Lysistrata was read aloud in class during a session of the humanities course in the first semester of the 1985-86 school year. Among the students in the class on that day was the daughter of The Reverend and Mrs. Fritz M. Fountain.

In the spring of 1986, The Reverend and Mrs. Fountain filed a formal complaint regarding Volume I of Humanities with the defendant School Board of Columbia County, the government entity responsible for  [*1549]  administration of the Columbia County School System [hereinafter "School Board"]. The Fountains also filed a Request for Examination  [**3]  of School Media on a form provided by the defendants.

In response to this complaint, the School Board first adopted a "Policy on Challenged State Adopted Textbooks," which established the mechanisms for addressing any challenges to textbooks in use in the school system. Next, pursuant to the newly-enacted policy, the School Board appointed an advisory committee to review Volume I of Humanities. The advisory committee reviewed Volume I and recommended that the textbook be retained in the curriculum, but that Lysistrata and The Miller's Tale not be required reading in the humanities course.

At its April 22, 1986, meeting, the School Board considered the advisory committee's report on Volume I. It also heard from the defendant Silas Pittman, the Superintendent of the Columbia County School System. Pittman disagreed with the committee's findings and recommended either that Lysistrata and The Miller's Tale be deleted from Volume I or that the book itself be discontinued from use in the school's curriculum. The School Board agreed with the latter proposal, voting to discontinue any future use of Volume I in the curriculum. On a subsequent date, the Board members provided  [**4]  the following reasons for their decision:

1. The sexuality in the two selections.
 
2. A belief that portions of the two selections were excessively vulgar in language and subject matter, regardless of the value of the works as literary classics.
 
3. A belief that the subject matter of the selections was immoral, insofar as the selections involved graphic, humorous treatment of sexual intercourse and dealt with sexual intercourse out of wedlock.
 
4. A belief that the sexuality of the selections was violative of the socially and philosophically conservative mores, principles and values of most of the Columbia County populace.
 
5. A belief that the subject matter and language of the selections would be offensive to a substantial portion of the Columbia County populace.
 
6. A belief that the two selections were not necessary for adequate instruction in the course; nor was this particular textbook, in its entirety, necessary for instruction in the course.
 
7. A belief that the two selections were inappropriate to the age, maturity, and development of the students in question.

***

Based on the Supreme Court's recent decision in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260, 56 U.S.L.W. 4079, 98 L. Ed. 2d 592, 108 S. Ct. 562 (U.S. 1988), the Court finds that the defendants acted within their broad range of discretion in determining the educational suitability of the curricular materials in question.

***

Initially, the Court must determine whether the pedagogical goals motivating the School Board's decision in this case were legitimate ones. The members of the School Board identified two specific factors as having given rise to their decision to remove Volume I of Humanities: "the sexuality in the two selections"  [**13]  and the selections' "excessively vulgar . . . language and subject matter." The remainder of the reasons supplied by the Board members simply amplify why they believed that vulgar and sexually explicit materials could properly be removed from the curriculum. According to the Board members, the content of the subject materials violated the "conservative mores" of the community and was "inappropriate to the age, maturity and development of the students."

The plaintiffs contend that these reasons highlight the actual purpose of the Board members in removing the subject materials from the humanities curriculum, which was to impose their fundamentalist Christian beliefs on the students. According to the plaintiffs, such an attempt to deny the students access to viewpoints differing from the Board members' religious orthodoxy is essentially what the first amendment forbids.

The Court agrees with the plaintiffs that the School Board's decision reflects its own restrictive views of the appropriate values to which Columbia High School students should be exposed. The Court finds, however, that such content-based decision-making regarding curriculum is permissible under the standards set forth  [**14]  in Kuhlmeier. The Court in Kuhlmeier held that educators may limit both the "style and content" of curricular materials if their action is reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns. 56 U.S.L.W. at 4082. n6 The Court further held that denying students access to "potentially sensitive topics" such as sexuality is a legitimate pedagogical end. Id. But see West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642, 87 L. Ed. 1628, 63 S. Ct. 1178 (1943) (schools may not "prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion"). Because this pedagogical goal is the uncontroverted justification for the School Board's decision in the present case, this Court need only consider whether the decision of the School Board was reasonably related to this goal.

***

The Court faces a number of difficulties in making this determination. First, the Court finds it difficult to apprehend the harm which could conceivably be caused to a group of eleventh- and twelfth-grade students by exposure to Aristophanes and Chaucer. Indeed, authorities on Western literature are virtually unanimous in their high praise for the works of these authors. See, e.g., U. Violia, Greek  [**15]  and Roman Classics, (1965), at 328 (Aristophanes's comedies "are considered among the greatest ever written"); Major British Writers, (G.B. Harrison, ed. 1967), at 1 (Chaucer's name "stands in the annals of English literature second only to that of Shakespeare").

 [*1553]  Second, the Court has a more general concern regarding the breadth of measures that may be taken to protect students from materials containing sexuality or vulgarity. The plaintiffs argue in this case that the School Board's decision to remove Volume I in its entirety, rather than to take the less drastic measure of warning students of the potentially sensitive nature of two particular works, violates the established first amendment principle that restrictions on speech must be "narrowly tailored" to achieve the government's legitimate interests. Under the standard set forth in Kuhlmeier, however, a School Board's decision to remove curricular materials will be upheld if it is reasonable, even where that decision is not the least restrictive of student speech. See Kuhlmeier, 56 U.S.L.W. at 4083 (upholding principal's decision to excise two pages of newspaper rather than objectionable articles within those two  [**16]  pages). See generally Cornelius v. NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc., 473 U.S. 788, 808, 87 L. Ed. 2d 567, 105 S. Ct. 3439 (1985) (government's limitation of speech in nonpublic forum need only be reasonable; it need not be the most reasonable or the only reasonable limitation). Thus, under Kuhlmeier, this Court assumes the limited role of determining whether sexuality or vulgarity are at all present in the removed materials, and if so, determining whether the measure taken to remove the sexuality and vulgarity was at all reasonable.

The Court finds that sexuality and vulgarity are both unquestionably present in the contested materials. The plots of both Lysistrata and The Miller's Tale involve sexual relations: Lysistrata concerns the attempt by the women of a community to put an end to an ongoing war by denying the men sexual intercourse; The Miller's Tale concerns a sexual affair between a divinity student and his landlord's wife. In addition, both works contain passages which may reasonably be considered to be sexually explicit n7 or vulgar. n8
 
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n7 An example of a sexually explicit passage may be found in Lysistrata, where the heroine Lysistrata leads the women of the community in a pledge of allegiance designed to convince the men of the community to end the Peloponnesian Wars.

LYSISTRATA Lampito: all of you women: come, touch the bowl, and repeat after me:

 
I WILL HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH MY HUSBAND OR MY LOVER

 
(Oh, Lysistrata! This is killing me!)

 
The night was dark as pitch, black as coal, and out the window she thrust her hole. And Absolon, as Fortune had in store for him, with his mouth kissed her naked ass with relish before he knew what was happening. He started back and thought something was wrong, for he knew well that women do not have beards and he had felt something rough and long-haired.

Nicholas had gotten up to piss and thought that he could improve on the joke. He would have Absalon kiss his ass before he left. He quickly raised the window up and slyly thrust his ass far out, buttocks and all, even to the haunches.

Then Absalon said, "Speak, sweet bird. I don't know where you are."

Nicholas at once let fly a fart as great as a thunder clap, that almost blinded Absalon. But he was ready with his hot iron and smote Nicholas in the middle of his ass.