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Assassination Classroom Manga Removed From U.S. School Libraries at Least 54 Times in 2024-2025 Year
posted on by Alex Mateo
Each individual volume ban counts as an instance. However, in some cases on the report, some schools have banned the 21-volume series in general, but it is only listed as a single instance. School districts that have banned the manga are the Hillsborough County Public Schools in Florida, Oak Ridge Schools in Tennessee, Pennridge School District in Pennsylvania, North East Independent School District in Texas, Horry County Schools in South Carolina, Lamar Consolidated Indpendent School District in Texas, Rutherford County Schools in Tennessee, and Nacogdoches Independent School District in Texas.
Other manga on the list of public school bans from the past school year include Attack on Titan, Bleach, Black Butler, Black Clover, Blue Period, Boys Run the Riot, Bungo Stray Dogs, Dragon Ball, Durarara!!, Fairy Tail, Hunter X Hunter, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Jujutsu Kaisen, Kekkaishi, Naruto, One Piece, Seraph of the End, and Soul Eater, among others.
In the Assassination Classroom manga and its adaptations, a class of middle school students are tasked to assassinate their homeroom teacher (who is an apparent alien with superpowers) before it destroys Earth at the end of the school year.
Matsui's manga ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 2012 to 2016. The manga inspired a 22-episode television anime series that aired in 2015, and a 25-episode second season that aired in 2016. Toonami began airing the anime's first season in August 2020, and started airing the second season in 2022. An anime film opened in Japan in November 2016. The series is getting a new anime film on March 20, 2026 as part of the anime adaptation's 10th anniversary.
Background
Gifford Middle School in eastern Florida removed the Assassination Classroom manga from its library in March 2023 after receiving complaints from groups. The Elmbrook School District in southeastern Wisconsin similarly removed the manga from its electronic library that month after a complaint by a parent. The series faced challenges in other states as well.
Horry County Schools, the school district serving Horry County in South Carolina, moved to remove Matsui's Assassination Classroom manga from its school libraries in November 2024, after the mother of a ninth grader at Socastee High School complained to the district regarding the manga's content. According to the district's policy, the District Reconsideration Committee's decision "and if applicable, the local board's review" cannot be challenged for five years. The books were temporarily removed from libraries in October 2024 during the review period.
Jennifer Hannigan, the mother who issued the complaint, described the manga's content, saying that the manga has numerous pages depicting "handguns, rifles, knives, and potions," and that the story "talks about killing in the pages." She added that "there's girls in lingerie hopping on top of men in the book." She also noted that the manga's characters discuss ways on how to kill their alien teacher in the story.
Utah banned 13 non-manga books from all public schools in the state in August 2024, under a new law that bans books in all of Utah's 41 school districts if at least three districts boards ban them for pornographic or indecent material. According to the Associated Press, Tennessee, Idaho, and South Carolina have similar laws and regulations that allow books to be banned in school libraries statewide.
The Brevard Public Schools Board in Florida banned the first volume of Shō Harusono's Sasaki and Miyano boys-love manga from the district's school libraries during a board meeting in August 2024. A person in the district challenged the book's inclusion in the schools' libraries on the grounds that "sexual orientation should not be encouraged, suggested, or implanted" in the youth. The complaint also included concerns children would be "exposed to age-inappropriate, obscene, explicit content" and that there was "no value in making homosexual books available at school." The book is rated for T for Teens.
Sources: Pen America (link 2), ICv2 (Milton Griepp)
