Controversial Books
There have been a lot of stories in the national headlines about controversial books. This is an issue that has come before school boards across the country, so I want to address my stance on them.
- I do not believe in banning books. Literature is absolutely sometimes uncomfortable. That doesn't mean that we should restrict access to it.
- I believe that school libraries should contain age-appropriate reading materials.
- I believe that students need access to high-quality reading materials on a wide variety of high-interest topics that they can see themselves represented in.
- I do not believe we should have books in our school libraries with any sort of pornography.
I would like to note specifically that there is one book called "Lawn Boy" which has gained a lot of national attention. There is a book titled Lawn Boy by Gary Paulsen, who is a wonderful author for the upper elementary/middle school audience. This book IS in our libraries. This is NOT the book at the center of the controversy. The book Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison is the one that has content that I absolutely believe is inappropriate for our schools. To my knowledge, this book is not currently in our GCS libraries. You can see an article about the Evison version, including explicit exerpts, here.
Action Items
Assemble a committee of parents, teachers, and librarians to be tasked with the following:
- inventory library books at all schools (this should exist, but I'm hearing that many new books have been purchased recently that may be on the shelves but not inventoried)
- develop a set of criteria for rating books (reading level, grade level appropriateness, potentially controversial content, etc)
- establish procedures to ensure that books at each grade band are grade level appropriate
- develop processes to allow potentially controversial books to remain in libraries while restricting access to them
- allow parents to opt-in to potentially controversial content, rather than allowing unrestricted access to these materials