What we focus on become our reality, which is why it is so important for our brains to focus on real, meaningful, and positive goals.

If we rid our libraries of such books, we say to our students: you’re on your own. Don’t expect to find help here. Reading won’t illuminate your path, bring you comfort, dignify your suffering. Nope. You can read happy books about doves and unicorns and no one will ask you about what happened to you or help you process it. You are alone, possibly freakish in your isolation, and you will never see your experience reflected in what you read.

We recently had the misfortune to confront this: Moms For Liberty Bucks County Leaders Think Public Schools Are Trying To Bring Pedophilia Into the Classroom.

We condemn in the strongest terms this foul attempt to smear our teachers. We condemn the lie. We condemn the ill intent. We condemn the harm done to our schools, our teachers, and especially to our children, when an irresponsible group cries wolf to advance their political agenda.

News for our CB leadership: your own PR firm is telling you that they cannot paper over your bad policies. Blaming your own constituents for the inevitable consequences of your bad decisions will deceive no one.

D&P, their clients, 74+ school board directors, 15+ national & local civil rights, education rights, literacy, and academic groups, and the public at large know your true colors.

"When I liberate myself, I liberate others. If you don't speak out ain't nobody going to speak out for you."

Fannie Lou Hamer

Residents of Central Bucks, if you believed that the conflict over freedom in our schools didn’t matter much or would resolve itself, think again. As of today, more than 60 books in our libraries have been challenged, probably to be removed. Policy 109 gives such power to our admin and gives so little defense of any book, literally despite recognized literary merit, that they can ban anything they dislike.

Do you really want people on your school board who want to get out of advocating for public schools? Is this a winning platform?

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?

In case you missed it, what happened was this. On January 25 a CB librarian posted this quotation from the works of Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor and writer Elie Wiesel:

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

Two days before Holocaust Remembrance Day, someone had a problem with it and considered it in violation of policy 321. Was it or wasn’t it? Who could possibly say?

On Tuesday, January 17, 2023, on a cold, overcast, wintry day, approximately 150 people took a stand on the sidewalk outside one of our high schools. At that moment, Our Superintendent was preparing to explain to East teachers what policy 321, the directive that teachers quit “indoctrinating” students, would mean to them. Our Superintendent had billed this session as a “town hall”.

After the January 10 School Board meeting, we can see that there is one overriding question raised by those who support policy 321 that we have neglected to answer…

When you listen carefully to the arguments made on both sides, you see that they are inside-out-and-backwards reflections of each other.

Read on for a brief point-by-point summary.

Today, Quoyle is here to answer questions received during our January 5, 2023 Facebook live discussion about policy 321. A number of these questions are difficult to understand. They do not arise out of anything observed in CB. They seem to come from national talking points about vague “agendas” and “wokeness”.

Nevertheless, as Advocates for Inclusive Education, we see value in addressing all the concerns, so here goes.

As we prepare to return to school after our holiday break, we might take a moment to dwell on our gratitude for what has made Central Bucks a great place for so many of us to call home: our schools, teachers, and staff.

Tuesday night’s school board meeting was a cruel spectacle. Mrs. Smith compared the 6’s policy mania to a runaway train that they refuse to admit has working brakes. It appears that student welfare, freedom of expression, trust in teachers, and teacher autonomy are tied to the tracks.

This week the vagueness of CB’s new policies proved to be as confusing as we all thought they would be. We now know that was by design. By keeping everything vague and self-contradictory, by sending mixed messages and no clear message, our admin has managed to confuse both teachers and parents.

Inspired by Annie Proulx’s novel The Shipping News, “The Schooling News”, is a once weekly deep dive into the school board issues impacting our community. Named after Proulx’s character in The Shipping News, C.B. Quoyle is a writer, a family person, someone who came from elsewhere and chose this area as their own many years ago.