An online search gave me various high marks and rankings of “top this” and ” the best this,“and with recommendations from trusted people in my life and a location close to my children’s family on both sides, I found a home and we all settled in.
But fast forward nearly nine years and this school district is the reason I want to walk away. The most recent reason? The school board recently passed a “library materials policy,” which many parents in my community refer to as a book ban.
The new policy will allow books that a yet-to-be-determined committee deems inappropriate to be removed from shelves and will focus on “age-inappropriate content.” The policy states that for middle school students, for example, the superintendent will “seek to prioritize” books that “do not contain other sexualized content, such as implied descriptions of sexual acts or implied depictions of nudity.”
The policy allows any resident to challenge a book in a school district library, at which point, that committee will determine if the book is “inappropriate” and should be removed.
The school board superintendent and director said in an email sent before the vote that it was not a book ban, but rather “intended to prioritize materials that support and enrich the curriculum and /or personal interests and student learning”.
Chris Kehan, a 32-year-old veteran teacher-librarian in the Central Bucks School District, told me that librarians must now submit their list of books for approval by the superintendent or designate to determine if any of the sexualized content specified by the policy is present before these titles. can be added to the school library. “We’re concerned that we won’t be able to get the books to teachers in a timely manner so they can do their jobs,” Kehan said, after sharing the thorough process she uses to choose the books for the kids in her. primary school.
According to Jonathan Friedman, director of free speech and education at PEN America, the Central Bucks School District’s “library materials policy” isn’t technically a book ban. But based on what he sees in school districts across the country, “these policies are designed to try to make it faster and easier to facilitate book removal,” he said.
Asked to comment on this story, Abram Lucabaugh, superintendent of the Central Bucks School District, said in a statement from the school district that they “strongly believe in the integrity of prioritizing age-appropriate, non-free content for our students, aligned with a curriculum and pedagogy that reflects the diverse experiences and interests of our students, no matter where they are in their own academic, cultural, and personal journey.
But what is considered age-appropriate and not free, and more importantly, by whom?
“We really have to consider what kind of tools we hand over to school officials,” Friedman said. “Librarians have professional ethics, extensive training, membership in a professional association, and a code of conduct that guides how they develop their collections. What we see undermines the power and discretion of teachers and librarians, and replaces it with decision-making by a limited number of people based on their narrow ideological precepts.
As a biracial Asian American mother raising multiracial children, two of whom are LGBTQ, I will do whatever I can to make sure they see themselves in their school books. I want my kids to read a variety of books to both see themselves in literature and see how other people live, how the world actually works. I want books to challenge them. I don’t want their books challenged.
There are steps parents can take to help navigate this situation, which is cropping up across the country. I spoke to the experts about what caregivers should do if their school prohibits or seems to be heading in that direction.
Know the policy. Kehan suggests reading the policy carefully to fully understand what is being proposed or adopted. These policies should be available on your school board’s website. By carefully reading the politics in my own school district, I learned a lot more than if I had just listened to the chatter around town. The more I know, the easier it is to ask the right questions and know what we are up against.
express yourself. After familiarizing yourself with the new policy, email members of your school board with your questions and concerns, specifically asking for clarification of parts that are unclear or vague. Come to your school board meetings to share your concerns. It is important for the school board to understand that the policy does not represent the values of the community.
Look for support. Miah Daughtery, vice president of academic advocacy and literacy for the Northwest Evaluation Association, suggests that you bring like-minded people together in your community to present themselves in different ways. “The way parents can advocate is different from that of teachers and librarians; the voice of the community is important,” said Daughtery. It’s not just about your public school library. Although a policy of banning books or library materials has already been adopted, “we must realize that this is part of a reduction in a set of democratic freedoms that are slowly becoming more and more threatened”, said said Friedman.
read at home. There’s a reason school librarians and educators choose the books they make, so I’ll make sure my kids read them whether they end up in the school library or they’re pulled out and replaced. And at Kehan’s suggestion, I’ll read them too. Books can create the opportunity for children (and their parents) to have difficult conversations about important topics. And, as Daughtery says, seeing characters who look like you can help reflect your lived experience and make you feel not alone. But they can also help you understand, exist, and talk with people whose lives reflect a different experience than yours.
As a parent of four future adults, this is an important part of living in this world. If my public school isn’t doing the job it should be doing, then I’ll make sure to do it.
