Facing fierce community opposition, the Central Bucks School District on Tuesday approved a controversial library policy targeting books with “sexualized content” — guidelines that the district’s superintendent says ensure students read “age-appropriate material” — but the Pennsylvania Library The Library Association calls it one of the most restrictive in schools in the country.
By a 6-3 vote, after a rally and more than an hour of public comment — most strongly opposed the policy — and questions from some committee members about its origins, the Republican-dominated committee voted to advance the policy that had been highlighted. alarm among civil rights groups.
Members Tabitha Dell’Angelo, Karen Smith and Miriam Mahmud voted against approving the bylaw, insisting that community opposition should have prompted them to vote, questioning the details of the bylaw — including who wrote it, and demanding more details of the process by which a committee appointed by the superintendent will consider literature to be selected or removed from school shelves.
Board Chairwoman Dana Hunter, Vice Chairwoman Leigh Vlasblom and members Sharon Collopy, Jim Pepper, Lisa Sciscio and Debra T. Cannon voted in favor of the policy and said they will leave it up to Superintendent Abram Lucabaugh to develop the board and set the parameters for how the books can be selected.
“The moment is just coming to allow Dr. Lucabaugh and our administration, who we trust and respect for the work they’re doing, to put together a team to come up with a process to share with us,” Vlasblom said. , urging the board to adopt the rules.
With signs reading “dictators ban books, not democracies” and “love not hate makes CB great,” dozens of parents, students, community members, educators and advocates gathered outside Doylestown School District headquarters Tuesday night before the vote, calling for the board to declare policy. Many repeated their comments during public comment before the school board. Few speakers expressed approval of the policy.
“It’s not a ban, it’s not censorship, it’s common sense,” said one mother, who said she was “against exposing minors to sexually explicit content.”
Speakers opposing the library protocol called it deliberately vague and asked the district to let trained librarians — rather than “a small group of parents” — choose literature for school libraries. More than 3,000 community members signed a petition against the proposal.
Karen Downer, president of the Bucks County branch of the NAACP, noted that the books most often flagged for sexual content “often involve specific themes,” including black history, LGBTQ themes or characters, and race and racism. According to her, books are often written by marginalized authors.
Lucabaugh — a proponent of the policy — said in an interview Monday that the intent is not to remove the book from school libraries, but to create a process for selecting new material and for parents to deal with “free, demeaning, excessive.” , unnecessary, sexualized content [in library books] that would not be age appropriate.”
He did not list specific books that could fall into this category.
“We don’t have titles in mind, per se,” Lucabaugh said. “The policy is based on prioritizing and selecting age-appropriate materials for our students that align with the curriculum and materials that reflect the diversity of our students’ experiences. We believe it is very important that … all our students are represented in the things they read in the library.”
Language introduced by the Bucks County School Board in May calls for more parental oversight of book contests available in school libraries, emphasizing that at all grade levels, “no material … shall contain visuals or implied depictions of sexual acts. ” or “explicit written descriptions of sexual acts”.
Lucabaugh said he will appoint a handful of administrators, teachers, librarians and other education professionals to develop a process for parents to challenge reading materials and guidelines for determining what can be considered “age-inappropriate, free content” in book selections school libraries. .
That committee, Lucabaugh said, “would be large enough to include multiple perspectives” and would “eliminate the possibility of any decisions being made in isolation.” He said that members of the school council will not be directly involved in the selection or removal of books.
But the retired English teacher addressed a crowd outside a board meeting Tuesday, saying the policy is “vague enough that librarians won’t know what’s going to be okay.”
“When a book is banned, there’s no transparency and there’s no resolution,” said Julie Zaebst, senior policy advocate at the ACLU of Pennsylvania, adding that she’s already heard from some teachers who fear the policy’s ramifications.
“We know that all students suffer when the expertise of experts is replaced by a large politicized process that happens behind closed doors,” she said.
“We haven’t seen this level of proposal”
‘We haven’t seen this level of proposal’
Lucabaugh and school board officials said the policy was introduced because the school district – Pennsylvania’s third largest – did not have one. This may interest you : The sound of music – Catholic Telegraph.
But Christi Buker, executive director of the Pennsylvania Library Association, which represents libraries statewide, said Central Bucks’ proposal stands out.
“It’s a pretty restrictive policy,” Buker said. “We haven’t seen this level of proposal in other school districts right now.”
Although Lucabaugh and school board officials say the policy is not a book ban, Buker disagreed.
“It bans books based on one specific aspect and ignores any other value of that piece of material,” she said.
During Tuesday’s meeting, board member Karen Smith echoed Buker’s sentiment.
“The policy clearly allows books to be removed from our libraries,” she said. “When something is removed and not allowed back, that’s a ban.”
“The policy is vague and overbroad,” said Richard T. Ting, an attorney with the ACLU.
“We are also talking about library books, … which are not required reading for class assignments. These are just books in the library that are meant for students, and students should be free to choose what they read. Families should also talk about these things with their children. A few people shouldn’t decide what everyone else has access to.”
Lucabaugh countered that “reading may not be required, but access to [books] is always there.”
“School districts have always established and maintained policies and boundaries regarding the appropriateness of content,” he said.
In a district-wide message to parents last week, Lucabaugh and School Board President Dana Hunter said the policy had been “mischaracterized in our community and in the press” and wrote that every student “deserves to be seen, heard, cared for, included, accepted, respected, loved and, above all, educated.”
The letter also states that not all books containing “sexual content” will be subject to removal from libraries.
“Books like Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye,’ which describes the real-life horrors of racism and sexual abuse, belong in our age-level school libraries,” they wrote. “So are classics like ‘The Scarlet Letter’ or an illustrated anatomy reference book.”
The message, Ting said, “ironically highlights the problem with this kind of politics.
“Like, why can they say that and make that decision?”
National focus on LGBTQ content
A nationwide focus on LGBTQ content
The Central Bucks library’s policy proposal comes as book bans have grown across the country — as has the focus on content that includes LGBTQ characters and stories. To see also : Scarborough library to celebrate art outdoors – Portland Press Herald. Some conservative politicians and activists have accused public schools of “indoctrinating” students around gender and sexuality.
» READ MORE: West Chester School District Keeps ‘Gender Queer’ Amid Nationwide Challenge of Sexually Explicit Books
The library policy follows other policy changes in Central Bucks, including a call for the district to remove pride flags from classrooms and move its sex education classes online after facing backlash for ordering transgender and non-binary students to attend classes. which correspond to the gender assigned at birth.
“It’s not very hard to connect the dots between this policy and these other actions by the school district that are clearly anti-LGBQ and T,” Zaebst said, adding that the ACLU is monitoring the district’s actions “very closely.”
On Monday, Lucabaugh said Central Bucks’ proposed policy “is not based on one genre of literature” or one intended audience. If the panel finds a book with LGBTQ characters or a plot to be “gratuitous and overly sensationalistic,” it should be replaced “with a comparable book … for an LGBTQ audience,” he said. If the board can’t find comparable reading, Lucabaugh said, the challenged book can remain on the library shelves.
“No book made me transgender, just like no book changed my eyes from brown to blue,” Lilly Freeman, a student at Central Bucks East, said Tuesday. “Schools are a place of learning, and when you take away access to a variety of books, you’re taking away safe public resources that allow kids like me to see themselves in a culture, to learn about themselves.”
