I attended the Lancaster County School Board meeting Tuesday, August 20, as I have for the past seven months. After my opponents for school board representative for District 6 filed for office on the same day I filed, which was opening day, August 1st, I assumed they would begin attending the school board meetings as well. To my surprise, neither of my opponents were in attendance at the meeting.
According to the LCSD School Board agenda for August 20, they were making changes to Board Policy IFAAA: Library and Media Center Materials concerning challenges to books in compliance with the new state Regulation 43-170, Uniform Procedure for Selection and Reconsideration of Instructional Materials, but they didn't include the statement that is included in 43-170 three times that states in various forms, “In no event shall a decision in a matter arising under this section be based primarily on or motivated primarily by disagreement with or opposition to the viewpoints expressed within the challenged material.” Because of this omission, I spoke during the public forum to address this and request that this statement be added to district policy.
Once they finally got to the part of the meeting where the changes to the board policy on library and media materials were discussed, it shocked me that it appeared the board members were unaware of 43-170, but it didn't surprise me they were upset about their local authority being diminished. They wanted to make changes to the suggested wording by their attorneys that came straight from 43-170 not realizing what the regulation required. It was then that I determined they had no clue what I was talking about during the public forum and didn't understand why it is so important to add this statement from 43-170 to the board policy. It was the first reading of the policy, and the suggested changes made by the attorneys were approved (with a few changes of wording) without any discussion of adding the statement I had suggested. I am really worried about what will happen if they get a parent or guardian who makes numerous frivolous book challenges if I am not the one from District 6 elected to the board (I will discuss this in depth in a later blog).
Of course we want to protect our students from pornography and inappropriate sexual material based on their age and developmental abilities, but we don't want viewpoint discrimination to cause books to be pulled from the shelves, especially books that represent marginalized communities. One example of this brought up during the public comment section at the State Board of Education when the regulations were being deliberated is the viewpoint of some that all books with gay and lesbian characters are pornographic regardless of whether they have descriptive sexual scenes. Regulation 43-170 clearly, expressly, and repeatedly states that decisions to retain or remove a book cannot be made based on the decision-maker’s disagreement with or opposition to the viewpoints expressed in the book. This is the statement I requested to be added to LCSD Board Policy IFAAA: Library and Media Center Materials.
While the State School Board was deliberating 43-170, I met with our district representative to the State Board of Education, Joyce Crimminger, to discuss my concerns and suggestions. I even spoke before the State Board of Education during the public comment period on the day the regulation was to be finalized to address my concerns and suggest amendments, some of which were added to the regulation that afternoon before the State Board of Education voted to finalize it. I have read Regulation 43-170 in full several times and have read the recommendations posted on the South Carolina Department of Education website for school boards and school administrators.
I am sensitive to the feeling of loss of local authority by the LCSD School Board members by Regulation 43-170 because our district policy was well designed with several levels of intervention to try to develop a solution acceptable to a complainant who challenged a book before it was completely removed from the shelves, except in instances where there was clear sexual obscenity in a book that required immediate removal from all school shelves.
With 43-170, the parent/guardian is required to attempt to resolve the issue with the school administration before filing a complaint; but once a complaint is filed, the school board has 90 days to convene a quorum of the school board to consider the complaint and vote to grant or deny, either in whole or in part, the relief requested by the complainant. Before voting, the board is to allow members of the community to make public comments either in defense of or opposition to the complaint. If the parent/guardian who made the complaint is not satisfied with the decision of the board, he or she can appeal to the State Board of Education. If the state board decides to remove the book from the shelves, it doesn't just happen at the local school district where the complaint originated, but all school districts in the state must pull all copies of the book from their shelves. It doesn't matter if a local school district has already reviewed the same book and, to the satisfaction of the complainant, say, restricted it to certain grade levels or implemented a policy where a parent or guardian must give permission before a student can check the book out of the library; if the state board decides to pull a book during an appeal, ALL school districts in the state MUST remove the book from their shelves.
In a post in the near future, I will discuss why I think it is critical that I get elected to the school board and why I worry about the impact of one of my opponents winning the election. You won't want to miss that blog.
Jeanna Rathel-White, Ph D.
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