Over the past few months, we have witnessed two vastly different approaches to addressing concerns with the district’s library and book curation policy. Progressives Steven Blair and Carolie Owens refuse to consider policy changes, all while their supporters insist “you should have to pass a test administered by the school district in order to be able to challenge an inappropriate school library book”.

Unlike Blair and Owens’ constant obstruction, your conservative board majority has worked with both the FHSD community and district employees to create an updated policy which balances community feedback and district personnel input.

Hopefully our two previous articles (here and here) have shown the scale of the problem – created by third parties with a dangerous ideology, facilitated by librarians unable to read everything, and perpetuated by administrators who won’t do their job to stand up for actual education. What has been missing from this whole process is parent and community voices.

How will the new policies help the situation? Here are two major ways:

  1. Adding clear content suitability guidelines helps guide the selection of books and also helps challenge committees have a better understanding of how to analyze challenged books. Current policy provides no useful guidance. These changes will make the process more transparent and consistent.
  2. Current policy puts district administrators in charge of the challenge committee and its decision – they can (and do) stack the committee with people who will vote to keep all challenged books, and they are not accountable to the public for those decisions. The new policy proposal puts the final decision and the responsibility on the school board, which is elected by and accountable to district residents.

We applaud the new policy proposals (which have already been modified to take librarians’ and others’ concerns into account), and encourage the board to pass them at the next board meeting. You can view the proposed policies by going to the BoardDocs website, navigating to the July 18, 2024 meeting, and looking at the attachments for agenda item 9.

If you would like to speak up in support of these common sense guidelines, please drop an email to the board members and let them know that district libraries should help educate students in the best of our culture, not expose them to the worst of it.

Adam.Bertrand@fhsdschools.org, Randy.Cook@fhsdschools.org, Jane.Puszkar@fhsdschools.org, Ron.Harmon@fhsdschools.org, Mark.Ponder@fhsdschools.org, Steven.Blair@fhsdschools.org, Carolie.Owens@fhsdschools.org

Here’s what else you can do: