GUILDERLAND — A young-adult novel proposed for use in 10th-grade English classes was opposed by two school board members here. One said that the request form did not adequately describe how the topic of police brutality would be handled in the classroom — for instance, whether other perspectives would be offered on the subject, to enlarge the debate — while another was worried about the tensions that might rise during class discussions.

The novel, “All American Boys” by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, which came out in 2015, explores the effects of an incident of police brutality on two boys from the same high school: a young African-American high school student violently beaten by an officer who believed he had been shoplifting, and a white student who witnesses the beating and happens to be a long-time family friend of the officer.

Reynolds is black, and Kiely is white. Their novel received the 2016 Coretta Scott King Author Honor Award and the 2016 Walter Dean Myers Award for Outstanding Children’s Literature.

"There have been school boards and administrations in a handful of states who've decided to censor the book, and I fear it's because they assume the book is anti-police, which it is not,” Kiely wrote in an email to The Enterprise. “Some folks think the language is too strong. Both of those assumptions worry me, because in the vast majority of schools and libraries across the country where we've spoken to young people across the socioeconomic spectrum, they've told us how much the book sounds just like them and how much it directly reflects a reality they are trying to process and understand. If adults decide to censor the book, they are robbing young people of a tool to help them process.”

Kiely added, “Censorship does nothing to protect young people; instead, it perpetuates further harm and disenfranchisement for people who already feel voiceless or unheard."

The Guilderland School Board approved the novel, 7 to 2, for use in 10th-grade classrooms, with board Vice President Christopher McManus and member Teresa Gitto voting against it.

Board members Seema Rivera and Cathy Barber said that they appreciated the multifacetedness of the book’s characters, since that would lend itself to interesting discussions.

Gloria Towle-Hilt, a retired middle-school teacher, suggested that McManus’s concerns were related to lesson plans, which she said was not the purview of the board but was best left to teachers.

Barbara Fraterrigo said she was surprised that the topic of police brutality had not been explored in the request form, adding that she hoped that the subject would be handled in class discussions in a sensitive and even-handed way.

Gitto and McManus both said that, depending on how it was handled, classroom discussion of the book could either be productive or could, as McManus put it, “go south.” McManus is married to an assistant principal at Guilderland High School and has two young children, the older of whom is in Lynnwood Elementary. Gitto has three school-aged children, spread among the high school, middle school, and Lynnwood Elementary.

McManus said that he did not see any appreciation, in the request form, of the idea that some students — who plan to go into law enforcement or who have relatives who are police officers, for instance — might be offended by the book. He asked if other views would be brought in in some way — for instance, by inviting members of the Guilderland Police Department to offer their views on police brutality.

Board members had received copies of the book and begun to read it more than a month before, although the Feb. 15 meeting was the first public discussion of the book. McManus had already expressed his concerns, and teachers had made additions and revisions to the request form. The revised form, in the section asking “What sensitive issues might need teacher special attention?” singles out only language.

Teachers requesting the text wrote simply, “There are some examples of ‘adult’ language as the characters express their emotions regarding a wide variety of frustrations.”

Alex Finsel, the high school’s instructional administrator for English, social studies, reading, and Library Media, said that he had heard the concerns from board members and had read the book himself, spoken with teachers who want to use the book, and incorporated new information into the request form. He said he expanded the form himself, from just a couple of pages to five, in an effort to address those concerns.

Finsel said that race was a vehicle in the book for thinking about issues of loyalty and integrity. Many characters in the book wore uniforms, Finsel said, including the young man who is beaten up — that character, Rashad, is in the Army’s Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, while the father of the other boy is a local hero who was killed while deployed to Afghanistan.

The book challenges readers to begin to think about what, beyond a uniform or a certain job or status, makes someone a good man; it challenges readers, Finsel said, to think about whether and how they might stand up to even close family if they realized when they fundamentally disagree about what is right.

Finsel said he was not trying to downplay anyone’s concerns, but that he thought he had addressed sensitive issues when he described in detail the themes that are explored through the book’s multifaceted main characters.

“It is important to engage in conversation regarding topics that are difficult,” Finsel said. “From my position here,” he continued, “school is a safe place to have these conversations. School is a place where there are adults who are caring, and want to support student learning, and we have resources, because ultimately our responsibility in high school and public education is to prepare our kids to be successful upon graduation, whether they want to go to college, into the workforce, into the military, or start a family, and when they arrive at their final destination, the lifelong destination, we want to make sure that they’re at least able to handle and engage in difficult conversations, or at least be informed about what’s going on around them.”

The last controversy that she could remember about an English-class textbook was in 1994 over “The Great Santini” by Pat Conroy, said Judith Rothstein, who was the high school’s English department chairwoman at the time.

According to Enterprise records, a student was opposed to the use of that book, and read before the board a lengthy passage graphically describing a woman’s rape. In that case, the board listened to two hours of testimony from 15-year-old Joseph Smith before voting unanimously to approve “The Great Santini” for 10th-grade classroom use.

In 2004, the board also heard from a parent, Dianna Le Fevre, who said that her 11-year-old son’s classmates had been influenced to begin using racial slurs after they read “Mississippi Bridge,” a period novel set in the rural south of the 1930s, written by African-American writer Mildred Taylor in language that was realistic for that time and place.