Defending Kids’ Right to Read Good Books: Where We Are Now.

Written By C.B. Quoyle

“I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.” 

― Kurt Vonnegut

We have focused recently on the dire state of stifled debate in our classrooms thanks to the ill-conceived and ill-intended Policy 321. We had quite a moment when they banned Elie Wiesel for a day.

But let’s shift our gaze to Policy 109.2, the School Board 6’s effort to sanitize our libraries and strip good books from the shelves. One wonders if they’re taking Florida as their inspiration.

Our School Board 6 have a genius for creating problems out of solutions. You have to hand it to them. We used to have a system whereby:

  • Librarians chose new books for kids to read based on well known, published resources that read and reviewed new books

  • If a parent wanted their child not to read a book, they could easily and without drawing attention to their child simply place a note in the child’s school records and librarians would know which books that child’s parents had asked not to be checked out to their kid

  • If a parent felt a book was inappropriate for all students, that parent could file a request to have the book reviewed.

  • Everything went along fine. Kids read books, librarians did their jobs, literacy flourished.

Since then, everything has gone cattywampus and bumfuzzled. Here is a brief timeline since the beginning of the calendar year:

December

  • District tells librarians: “We have five book challenges and will need to form reconsideration committees for each of the books.”

  • The District tells the public once they receive a “challenge,” a complex process begins. The updates state that a committee, made up of district staff, reviews the book and gives the school board a “findings report.” But during that time, the district Super-Intendent can remove the book. The final decision rests with the school board.

January

  • Our Super-Intendent states that “no books have been challenged, nor has any book been removed from a library.” The district “is taking a look at books that were raised throughout the debate about this policy as part of the district’s due diligence as educators.”

  • “… The district has a responsibility to guard against the sexualization of children and will protect kids from age-inappropriate, graphic, sexualized content,” Our Super-Intendent said. “It is our duty to check it out, to ask questions, and to let our professionals do their jobs, and then to make informed decisions.”

  • District repeats, "Books remain on library shelves and are available to all students in those schools."

February

So, we have comments from the district claiming the high moral ground while contradicting themselves, their own policies, and public will. Nobody knows what the policy means, to whom, about what books. We have a completely opaque non-policy.

Our books are on “double-secret probation.”

Was there a movie from 1978 called Animal District, in which the character of the superintendent determined that, “There is a little-known codicil in the [school district] constitution which gives the [superintendent] unlimited power to preserve order in time of campus emergency. Find me a way to [remove those books]. The time has come for someone to put his foot down… and that foot is me.” That rings a bell.

Why go through this public agony of creating a policy to remove books from our libraries when they evidently never intended to obey their own rules?

And then, when you thought it couldn’t get weirder:

Christian Nationalist Connection

Updates to the policy were reviewed by a conservative Christian law firm, Independence Law Center. The Independence Law Center is the legal arm of the Pennsylvania Family Institute, which is a statewide branch of the national organization Family Research Council, an anti-LGBTQ Christian nationalist group designated as an extremist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

This was discovered by analyzing the metadata of a document the district forwarded to staff. It is undeniable, indisputable, that our policies are being reviewed by this activist Christian nationalist group.

When our School Board 6 speaks of “legal”, as in, “this is what legal told us,” this is evidently what they mean.

Their Proposed Remedy to Removed Books

According to the policy (and as we’ve already seen, the policy only applies to parents’ complaints and the board and admin retain the right to do whatever they want secretly and without oversight) the committees will find “appropriate replacements” for each book removed.

Really? Who gets to determine that? What could this possibly mean? So you remove Beyond Magenta and replace it with David Copperfield? This is absurd on its face and worse when you ponder it.

Books are like people: they are unique. You cannot replace The Catcher in the Rye with Goodbye, Mr. Chips. It will not work.

At issue

  • separation of church and state within a public school district

  • viewpoint discrimination

  • zero guidelines for "internal review" 

  • who determines what books are selected for "internal review"

  • new AR eliminates the requirement to review books in their entirety “literary merit”

  • new AR eliminates consultation with professional reviews and journals (Kirkus Reviews and School Library Journal) to determine suitability for readers

  • new AR only requires the committee to “review” the book. No mention of reading it. 

We would like to wrap this up in some positive form, but it defies wrapping. We have no policy, not one that the S.B. 6 and our Super-Intendent wish to obey.

Nobody knows when new books can get onto our shelves. We don’t care about books in their entirety anymore—only the bits someone, anyone, has a problem with: words, phrases, passages, “implied nudity,” anything.

We don’t care about getting kids books they want to read, only books that will offend nobody (and good luck with that). We’ve implied that one book is about the same as any other, except that some are super-naughty and nobody should read them ever.

This is not a policy. It’s a mass freakout.

“Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.” 
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

Is this what they mean by family values?

C.B. Quoyle

In 1993, Annie Proulx’s novel The Shipping News was published and won the Pulitzer Prize. It tells the story of a newly widowed man who has never known any luck or much love, who moves to Newfoundland with his aunt and two young children. There he finds a home. He writes for the local newspaper and because he’s a good listener and sensitive writer, he is awarded his own column: “The Shipping News.”

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Fahrenheit 321