MARY REICHARD, host: Tuesday 13 September 2022.
Thank you for visiting today’s issue of . the world and everything in itGood morning, this is Mary Reichhardt.
NICK EICHER, Host: I’m Nick Eicher. First: A discussion of what is appropriate in a local library.
According to the American Library Association, parents and patrons have requested the removal of more than 1,500 books from libraries, colleges and K-12 schools in 2021. That number is up from less than 600 just before the Covid school lockdowns spread.
Rachard: As home learning has increased, many parents have become more aware and vocal about their children’s education and school resources. But some warn that these efforts can backfire. WORLD’s Lauren Dunn reports.
Best: I have three children. They’re about to enroll – they’re in 9th grade, kindergarten, and he’s just starting 1st grade. And they go to the same district that I graduated from. The first time I attended a school board meeting was in May 2021 and it was due to his COVID mandate in the state of New York where we live.
LAUREN DUNN, REPORTER: Jackie Best kicked off its Moms for Liberty chapter this spring after failing to bid for a school board seat in Erie County, New York. Over the summer, she received a message from the mother of a kid in the same class as Best’s freshman, who asked if she had gone through the books on her reading list for summer homework.
Best: She began looking through them and found that quite a few contained explicit material. And she started sending me pictures, went to Barnes and Noble, picked up her book, and started turning the pages. She also found several books with explicit content.
Best was shocked by the graphic and sexual writing in some of the books. She referred to books like The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which landed several times on the American Library Association’s top 10 list of most commonly banned books. Contains homosexuality, offensive language, and sexually explicit content, to name a few. It was best to email my son’s teacher, then the principal and superintendent. The school offered to complete the assignment with a book of my son’s choice, but saw no need to change the list.
Best and her friends are not alone. Parents across the country are asking school leaders about the books available to their children.
Tiffany Justice is the co-founder of Moms for Liberty.
Justice: This really came from a branch of ours who noticed that certain books in public school libraries were of great concern. I was shocked when I saw books with extremely explicit sexual depictions, sexual violence accessible to elementary and middle school students.
Some parents have brought their concerns about the book to school board meetings. Justice says many of those parents have been labeled “book banners” to speak up.
Justice: They wanted to read an excerpt from a book that completely ignored what school districts were in these libraries. [and] Their mics were blocked. They were told that the material was too obscene to be read out in public meetings. And that hypocrisy was too intolerable for parents to bear.I couldn’t post it on social media, and I couldn’t talk about it openly at a school board meeting, but somehow the adults were ignorant of those things. There were no problems with books. It was unacceptable to be on a library shelf that our children could stumble upon.
According to Justice, Moms for Liberty encourages members who have concerns about the book to compare it to state obscenity laws. She sometimes says the content is so serious that she has to delete the book entirely.
Justice: Internet access in public schools is restricted. Children do not have access to every Internet website that exists on the World Wide Web. And for some reason it doesn’t seem to be considered a ban.
But this isn’t the first time the book has been revisited. And conservative parents aren’t the first to call for people to ditch books. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn faced criticism even in his 1880s, barely a year after its publication. During and after 2020’s racial tensions, more schools challenged Harper to hack his finn along with Lee’s “To Kill Mockingbird.”
Will Creeley is the Legal Director of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Creeley: Both sides have the problem that the other side is willing to completely remove those kinds of questions from underage access. This is tricky because it uses the classic lawyer example. , it is indeed a slippery slope. What is good for geese will ultimately be good for gander.
Just last month, just days before school started, the Keller, Texas school district removed all problematic books from its library shelves while they were being reviewed. Among the deleted books? Bible.
As for the curriculum, Creeley says case law has argued for decades that local school boards have considerable power over the curriculum. Within the scope, school board members can decide which books to include. But curriculum options are not the same as library options.
Creeley: The Supreme Court has said school libraries are a separate deal. Because in school libraries, student-initiated searches for information are voluntary. Not forced, not top down. The teacher did not say that you read these and return the report. At this point, students enter the library and find what they want to read on their own.
Creeley said that if a school board had a policy or procedure for determining whether a book would be allowed in a school library, it would probably be constitutional to follow that procedure to remove the book. But when school board members are simply removing books in a partisan fashion, a problem arises.
Back in New York, the procedure is exactly what Jackie Best is trying to follow. They say they don’t even agree to add a recommendation sticker or opt-in form.
Best: But this is one thing that really seems to resonate with a lot of parents. He seems to feel that there should be more conversations between parents.
I’m Lauren Dunn, a reporter for WORLD.
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