Sixth and seventh graders in the Mesa Public Schools will have to trek to their local library or high school to read Things I Have to Tell You (Candlewick, 2001), a collection of poems by teenagers that has been removed from the junior high school libraries in this Arizona community. Following a request for reconsideration reportedly filed by Lauren Mitchell, the parent of a 13-year-old seventh grade student at Stapley Junior High School, both copies of the book were removed in February after a committee of staff and parents made the decision to pull the title. They will now offer the copies to the Mountain View High School Library. “The committee’s choice was to offer the book for high school level placement,” says Helen Hollands, spokesperson for Mesa Public School. Requests to have books removed from school shelves in Mesa are rare, according to Hollands. Challenges have been made to the “Harry Potter” series, she says, though the titles remained on the shelves. The last such complaint stemmed around Nicholas Sparks’s novel The Notebook (Warner, 1996)—and in that case a committee chose to keep the book in the school as well, she says. “That was settled at the school level,” says Lisa Bowen, a certified school librarian and head librarian for Mesa Public Schools for the past three years. “That mom was going to have tell her child you can’t check out the book, and that was fine.” Things I Have to Tell You is a compilation of more than 30 poems written by teens ages 15–18 and edited by Betsy Franco. A School Library Journal review recommends the book for grades eight and up. Stapley is the only junior high school library in Mesa that had the title on its shelf, says Hollands. The book also resides in Red Mountain High School’s library, where its ninth- through twelfth-grade students may check it out. Hollands believed the book may have been available in both the junior high school and high school because junior high schools in Mesa went up to the ninth grade until about five years ago, she says. When ninth graders were moved up to the high schools, school library collections were not vetted for the new age range, she adds. None of Mesa’s schools have certified school librarians, Bowen says. Instead, media centers are staffed with resource center specialists, a position created about six years ago when school librarian positions were cut, she adds. Bowen was a school librarian in the school district at the time. Now overseeing school libraries at the district level, Bowen says she agrees with the decision to remove the book from the junior high, as she believes the poems about boys, their bodies, and drugs may not have be a good fit for the seventh and eighth grade students. “It’s a good book,” she says. “But it may be a little too much for middle school.”