Karen Grant and other school librarians across New Jersey are hearing a growing chorus of parents and conservative activists demanding that certain books – often dealing with race, gender and sexuality – be removed from shelves.
Last year, Grant and her colleagues at Ewing Public Schools, north of Trenton, updated a three-decade-old policy on handling parental objections to books they consider pornographic or inappropriate. Grant’s team feared that without a up-to-date policy, the district would immediately bow to someone who wanted certain books banned.
At about the same time, state legislators in Trenton were drafting legislation to establish a statewide book challenge policy, preventing book bans based solely on the book’s subject matter or the author’s background or views, while protecting public and school librarians from legal threats. or civil liability from anyone upset by the reading material they offer.
When Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy signed the bill into law last month, Grant breathed a little easier.
“We hear a lot of stories about our librarians feeling threatened and targeted,” said Grant, who works at Parkway Elementary School and is president of the New Jersey Association of School Librarians. “It was wrong and an injustice that must be righted.”
Amid an augment in book bans in school libraries and up-to-date laws in some red states that threaten criminal penalties against librarians, a growing number of blue states are taking the opposite approach.
New Jersey joined at least five other states – California, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington – have passed legislation in the last two years aimed at preserving access to reading materials on racial and sexual topics, including those related to the LGBTQ+ community.
Conservative groups have launched efforts to ban materials that protect children from content they consider harmful. According to data, there were 10,000 book bans across the United States in the 2023-24 school year – almost three times as many as the year before. recent report by PEN America, a nonprofit organization advocating for literary freedom.
“Some books are harmful to children – just as drugs, alcohol, R-rated movies and tattoos are harmful to them,” Kit Hart, president of the Carroll County, Maryland, chapter of Moms for Liberty, a national organization spearheading book ban drives, wrote in e-mail.
However, some states now protect librarians and the books they offer.
“State leaders are demonstrating that censorship has no place in their state and that the freedom to read is a principle that must be supported and protected,” said Kasey Meehan, director of the Freedom to Read program at PEN America, which is monitoring book bans starting in 2021.
However, the push to ban certain books continues unabated. While several states fight censorship in school libraries, some communities in those states are trying to regain local control and continue to remove material that conservative local officials consider dismal and harmful to children.
“Life is in balance”
New Jersey measure not only sets minimum standards for local communities when they adopt policies on how books are curated or have the ability to challenge them, but it also prevents school districts from removing materials based on “the provenance, background, or views about or contributing to library materials.” “. “
The law also provides librarians with immunity from civil and criminal liability for “acting in good faith.”
New Jersey Sen. Andrew Zwicker, the Democrat who introduced the legislation, until recently thought book bans were a disturbing trend but narrow to other states. But early last year, he went to brunch and encountered the school librarian, who told him she had faced a torrent of verbal and online abuse for refusing to remove several LGBTQ+ books from her library’s shelves.
“Then I realized how terribly wrong I was that these attacks on librarians and the freedom to read were happening everywhere,” Zwicker told Stateline. “I went up to her and asked, ‘What can I do?’”
He said he has already heard from Rhode Island lawmakers who are considering introducing a similar measure this year.
A child who identifies with the LGBTQ+ community may read memoirs such as “Gender queer” by Mai Kobabe and they feel seen for the first time in their lives, he said.
“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that life here is in balance, that these books are so essential to people, and that librarians are trusted gatekeepers who make sure that what’s on the library shelf is selected and appropriate, – Zwicker said.
These up-to-date state laws, several of which are titled the “Freedom to Read Act,” were passed almost entirely along party lines, with unanimous support from Democrats.
In New Jersey, Republican state Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia, who has worked in schools for the past 18 years, including as an English teacher, strongly opposed the measure. She did not respond to a request for an interview.
“These are not puritanical parents who say, ‘Oh, I don’t want my child to learn how babies are made.'” she said during the committee’s September hearing. “It’s ridiculous and we all know it.”
She added, “I want us to be able to have an honest conversation about what is in these texts and what is extremely inappropriate for this classroom.”
Execution and penalties
Laws vary from state to state, including enforcement and how localities that fail to comply are punished.
In Illinois, for example, school districts risk losing thousands of dollars in state grants if they violate a up-to-date state law discouraging book bans. But as the Chicago Tribune reported last monththis financial penalty was not enough to persuade many school districts across the state to comply, and administrators expressed concerns about giving up local control over school decisions.
Several school districts in other states rebelled in similar fashion.
North of Minneapolis, the St. School Board Francis Area last month decided would consult with the conservative group BookLooks to determine which books it would buy for its school libraries. BookLooks uses values from 0 to 5 grading system which flags books as containing violence and sexual content.
Under his grading system, books that have long been in school libraries – such as the Holocaust memoir “Night” by Elie Wiesel and “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou – would require parental permission to read.
When asked about the school district’s potential violation of state law, school board member Amy Kelly, who led the effort to encourage the operate of BookLooks, declined to be interviewed. Karsten Anderson, principal of St. Francis Area Schools, also declined an interview request.
In Maryland, Carroll County Schools led PEN America records show the state has implemented a book ban in recent years, removing at least 59 “sexually explicit” titles in the 2023-2024 school year.
Schools should not allow children to watch “lewdness and porn,” wrote Hart of Moms for Liberty. She got involved in the campaign more than three years ago, saying she wanted to protect her five children and their parents’ rights to make educational decisions.
To justify her opinion, she pointed to one book: “Let’s talk about it“A Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being Human” – a non-fiction book in the form of a graphic novel by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan, which aims to educate teenagers about anatomy and consensual and safe sex. The book also addresses other issues related to gender and sexuality. Hart compared the book’s illustrations of different ways of having sex to “erotica”.
“Parents who give their children alcohol or drugs or give them a tattoo will rightly be charged with a crime,” she wrote to Stateline in an email. “Schools that provide children with sexually explicit content are, at best, negligent.”
The future of book bans
According to PEN America, about 8,000 of the more than 10,000 book bans in the 2023-24 school year occurred in schools in Florida and Iowa. Lawmakers in these states passed legislation in 2023 that created procedures for school districts to remove books containing sexual content.
Iowa, now requires that reading materials offered in schools are “age appropriate” while in Florida law ensures that books challenged for depicting or describing “sexual conduct” will be removed from shelves until the district resolves the complaint.
Some of these banned books attached classics like Alex Haley’s “Roots” and Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”
Over the past year, lawmakers in Idaho, Tennessee and Utah have passed measures to ban the reading of certain material that is sexually explicit or otherwise deemed inappropriate, they say. December report from EveryLibrary, an Illinois-based organization that advocates for book bans. Arizona Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed similar regulations in June.
The topic was laws allowing book bans several processes in recent years, plaintiffs claim, these measures violate constitutional protections for free speech.
Late last month, a federal judge knocked down part of a 2023 Arkansas law that threatened jail time for librarians distributing “harmful” materials to minors. Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, a Republican, said the state would appeal the decision.
Every library is tracking This year, 26 bills will be considered in five states that would cover books with sexual and racial themes.
Organized efforts to remove books based on LGBTQ+ or racial themes will continue, said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom.
Association that songs book bans as part of its mission to support libraries and information technology, he found that most of them most frequently banned books there were LGBTQ+ heroes across the country.
“Librarians have always strived to ensure that individuals have access to the information they need, whether it be for education, enrichment or understanding,” she said in an interview. “Censorship is diametrically opposed to this mission.”
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