A school board in Alaska has got more than it bargained for after pulling classics including The Great Gatsby and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from the school curriculum, with members of the local community offering incentives to students to read the books anyway – including $100 (£80) prizes and free mac’n’cheese.

The Matanuska-Susitna borough school board in Palmer, Alaska, which oversees 46 schools, voted last week to remove five books from its curriculum for high-school English: F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and short-story collection The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. According to local paper the Frontiersman News, five members voted in favour of the removal, and two voted against. The books remain in school libraries, but will no longer be taught.

According to a flier from the district’s Office of Instruction, Angelou’s memoir had been challenged over its “sexually explicit material, such as the sexual abuse the author suffered as a child, and its ‘anti-white’ messaging”, while Fitzgerald’s classic novel was pulled for “language and sexual references”. Invisible Man was marked for containing “language, rape and incest”, while Catch-22 was included for its violence, “a handful of racial slurs” and the fact the characters “speak with typical ‘military men’ misogyny and racist attitudes of the time”.

But locals have protested the removal by promoting the books far and wide. Bookstore Fireside Books has been raising funds to get the books out to young readers locally, a digital book club has been set up to discuss the titles, the Mat-Su Valley Banned Book Challenge is offering a $100 prize to those students who read all five titles, and local food truck DallyMac & Cheese will give a free mac’n’cheese to students who present a one-page report on any of the books.

“By providing these books to MatSu Borough students, we aim to: broaden horizons, foster critical thinking, encourage healthy debate and discussion, nurture empathy and understanding, advocate engagement in social issues, enable independent thought [and] challenge censorship,” wrote Fireside Books on Facebook, adding that “many concerned individuals from far and wide” had donated money to pay for books to be distributed to children.

“There’s been a huge response from the community,” Mary Ann Cockle, owner of the store, told CNN. “The outpouring of support and concern about banning and censorship has been quite a surprise – but in a good way.”

The board was criticised by Palmer city council member Sabrena Combs, who told CNN that describing the topics covered by the books as “too harsh or too scary” was “absurd, because then you end up with kids that graduate and have no idea what any experience outside of their own could possibly be”.

She also slammed the timing of the meeting, which was livestreamed because of the coronavirus pandemic, saying the board had tried to slip it “under the radar”.

Jeff Taylor, one of the board members to vote for the books to be removed, stressed on Facebook that the books had not been banned, rather removed from the approved reading list. But he said that Covid-19 had made public interaction around the issue difficult, and acknowledged that the livestream “did not facilitate a quick public response”.

Taylor, who admitted to only having read The Great Gatsby from the selection of five books, said he wanted to “give parents more freedom, control, and involvement in determining what their children read”.

“I have no doubt that these books will be read more in the near future than they have been in the recent past. There are even rewards being offered, by private entities, for those who read them,” he wrote. “I applaud those who choose to read these books on their own accord. I applaud parents and caregivers who are involved in their student’s education. I applaud teachers who truly want to help students learn. If these are books that interest you, by all means, buy them, check them out, talk with people about them. That is the beauty of freedom.”