School board weighs book policy
Anderson County Board of Education has been discussing but has yet to vote on policies related to, a state law about school library books passed last July.
First, the law requires each school board to pass a policy for school libraries. This policy must have a procedure for how to choose books appropriate for students’ age and maturity levels. Second, it requires each board of education have a procedure to evaluate feedback from students and parents on library books. Third, it requires a procedure to regularly review the books already at each school’s library. Parents and students can appear before the board to challenge books, and then the board will have 60 days to review it or else a state committee will make that decision for them. There is, however, an appeal process.
“I adamantly oppose removing books. I think the librarians need to be making those decisions. The teachers need to be making those decisions,” Board of Education member Dail Cantrell, who led the discussion at the board’s Dec. 9 work session said. Cantrell works as a lawyer at the Cantrell Law firm and spoke on the issues from a legal and personal perspective. “I cannot think of a book other than pornography that I would say should not be in a school system,” he said, although he said that the appropriate books for an 18-year-old high school student were not the same as the ones for an elementary school student. Similarly, Board of Education Chairman Scott Gillenwaters said students should be able to research any topic.
Cantrell also said that going through all the books would be difficult for the Board of Education to do.
“I don’t think it’s fair to vote on a book you haven’t read,” he said. He recommended the school board deal with the issue during its work sessions rather than its regular meetings.
He also said the law “cannot survive legal scrutiny.” He said it was a politically driven law, meant to make the people who passed it look good.
Several board members expressed support for parents choosing whether to have their children read alternative books to the ones assigned by teachers. Anderson County Director of Secondary Schools Suzi Schmidt said the school system already has that policy.
Board of Education member Teresa Portwood said people see worse things on TV than in books, and Schmidt said people can find age-inappropriate materials on their phones easily.
Cantrell said so far school systems in Tennessee had removed 1,100 books from their school library collections. He criticized many of other schools’ choices of books to remove including “The Color Purple,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Animal Farm” and “The Kite Runner.”
He said some removed books were “relatively obscure” and “related to homosexuality or transgender issues” but of those books he said, “there are none currently in our school system.” He said the school system did not have the book “Gender Queer,” a book that led to complaints elsewhere. He said it was poorly written, and he had wasted his time reading it.
