CHEYENNE — One parent’s effort to remove a book from Cheyenne school libraries that they said “praises normalization of the LGBTQ community” has officially failed.

“As superintendent, I want to inform the board that I am accepting the committee’s recommendation to retain ‘Drama’ in all school libraries and classrooms with no restrictions,” Laramie County School District 1 Superintendent Boyd Brown told the school board at its regularly scheduled meeting last week.

Brown’s statement came four days after roughly 100 people packed into a conference room at Laramie County Community College to offer public comment to the District Reconsideration Committee, which reviews curriculum and library materials.

The reconsideration committee voted 7-0 on Jan. 30 to keep the book in all school libraries. A parent could have appealed the committee’s decision to the superintendent, but since Brown officially accepted the recommendation Monday night, he said the decision is now final.

The committee’s ruling followed a string of emotional testimonies, both for and against retaining “Drama,” a graphic novel by Raina Telgemeier. It tells the story of a middle-schooler named Callie’s involvement with the production of the play “Moon Over Mississippi,” during which two boys in the cast come out as gay.

That conversation started with a comment from Josh Covill, the parent who launched the original complaint in November. Covill wrote that the book “takes away parents’ rights to teach morals and values.”

The National Coalition Against Censorship had urged district leaders to keep the book on school library shelves. The coalition endorsed suggestions by the committee to make parents more aware of what materials are available in the library — and to allow them to prevent their children from checking out materials they don’t approve of — “while respecting and honoring their students’ freedom to read, to learn, and to grow.”