If a teacher is forbidden from getting copies of a book (even at their own expense), distributing them to students, and assigning reading and giving lessons on the book, then it’s effectively banned. Let’s not play semantics here.
In any event, can we agree that it's misleading to describe what happened simply as "banning" without further qualification? As an example of a more accurate description, I would point to Reason's article on the subject [1]:
> Tennessee School Board Pulls Maus From Eighth-Grade Curriculum
> A grim sign of the bureaucratic mentality controlling public education
[1] https://reason.com/2022/01/27/tennessee-school-board-pulls-m...
To avoid difficult, real subjects is to lie to children and make them into ignorant, naive, uneducated adults.