Area schools ready as fight wages on
Jack Silva was window shopping along Bethlehem’s Main Street one day when he saw a display of banned books at the Moravian Book Shop.
The titles had all been barred by schools throughout the country at one time or another. There was Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Beloved,” which explores the horrors of slavery, and Maia Kobabe’s graphic memoir “Gender Queer,” detailing the author’s journey with gender identity. Even Stephenie Meyer’s vampire-laced, teen romance novel, “Twilight,” sat among the collection of censored books.
“Books are learning opportunities,” said Silva, Bethlehem Area School District’s assistant superintendent and chief academic
officer. “And when I hear, ‘book bans,’ I think, ‘What’s the context of that? And what are the interest groups involved? And what are the issues?’ ”
Over the last year, conservatives across the country have increasingly tried to limit students’ access to books they deem inappropriate while simultaneously calling for more parental monitoring of content. Progressives have pushed back against these efforts as a guise to target LGBT and race-related titles.
Locally, Lehigh Valley districts have largely avoided calls for stricter regulation of students’ reading materials, with the exception of an East Penn community group.
Among the nationwide battles over books, a Texas lawmaker last fall compiled a list of 850 books he said could make students uncomfortable, including
“We have people with many different backgrounds. We have to make sure that we’re providing resources for all those backgrounds. And we have to make sure that we have policies and procedures in place that address people’s concerns.” — Joseph Kovalchik, Northampton Area School District Superintendent
titles that focus on sexuality and racism. In April, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed a bill into law that he campaigned on giving parents control over whether their children read books with “sexually explicit content” at school. And in multiple states, including most recently Oklahoma, laws have been passed requiring online library databases to block student access to material deemed harmful to children.
Lehigh Valley educators told The Morning Call they are wary of library policies, like one in Central Bucks School District, that make it easier to remove books from shelves. While district leaders fear public schools are becoming a political battleground, leaders said they already have procedures in place to select appropriate books for students and to handle parent and community complaints if they arise.
Books marked
Central Bucks, in Doylestown, passed a library policy in July restricting books with “sexualized content” from school libraries and allowing parents or residents to challenge inappropriate books for removal upon review by a designated committee. The American Civil Liberties Union has called the policy a book ban.
In East Penn, a community group formed about nine months ago to discuss content concerns in the district. The group Restoring Excellence in East Penn Education is calling for more parental involvement in selecting “age-appropriate” learning materials.
In an email, several leaders of the group focused on concerns with educational priorities, which they worry are being shifted from academic success to gender identity or racial politics.
They did not point to any specific library books they found concerning, but said some district parents in the group are “growing increasingly concerned about materials that inject politics into the classrooms.”
“When teachers shift their focus away from achieving student academic success to gender identity or racial politics, our children lose,” they said.
East Penn School District did not return multiple requests for comment on its library book selection policy.
Kirsten Hess, a district parent and owner of Let’s Play Books Bookstore in Emmaus, disagrees with the community group. She thinks East Penn has been improving the district through its diversity, equity and inclusion work.
“I see the district working hard to try to figure out what’s the best course of action and balancing the needs of the underrepresented students with what some people just see as regular academics,” she said.
Hess attended some of the school board meetings in Central Bucks when the library policy was being debated. She is on the board of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association, which works with booksellers in the area.
Hess said she is “devastated” by the policy in Central Bucks, and like many opponents, she fears the guidelines will allow people to target books with race-related themes or LGBT characters.
“Not to be too sarcastic, but why do we even have librarians if we have the need to have a school district implement people proofreading and curating and choosing books that are not OK to be in the library?” she said. “That’s the librarian’s job. It’s not theirs.”
Librarian’s job
Silva and other local administrators said districts have largely avoided content complaints by relying on librarians and media specialists to make sure students have appropriate books in school libraries from the start.
Monique Everett, the librarian at Liberty High School, said librarians must balance curriculum needs and the popularity of titles when ordering books. She said Bethlehem Area’s book selection policy incorporates principles promoted by the American Library Association and the Library Bill of Rights.
“We don’t hide anything,” said Everett, who has been a school librarian for 25 years. “We don’t sneak books in there that we want to put in there on a personal agenda. That is not our game. We also want to represent students’ interests and needs.”
Silva said no book has been escalated to his office for review in his 12 years at Bethlehem, but if there were a complaint, he would work with district staff to assess the book based on school board policy.
Silva said first he would determine if the book was readable for students based on grade-level literacy skills. The next step would be to ask school psychologists and social workers to examine the book’s content for any harmful influences based on their knowledge of children’s developmental stages.
“So it’s not, ‘I liked this book, so it’s good,’ or ‘I don’t like it, it’s gone,’ “he said.
Other local school districts, including Easton Area and Northampton Area, also rely on procedures from their respective board policies.
Easton Area Assistant Superintendent Tracy Piazza said community members can put in written requests to school principals for books to be reevaluated. The superintendent then would appoint a committee to review the book and the school board would make the final decision.
In Northampton Area, if parents have concerns about instructional materials, they can fill out a form, Superintendent Joseph Kovalchik said. The school principal would then work with the parent to handle the complaint. If further action is required, a committee of two teachers and a librarian would review the content. The school board has the final decision on unresolved complaints.
“We have people with many different backgrounds. We have to make sure that we’re providing resources for all those backgrounds,” Kovalchik said. “And we have to make sure that we have policies and procedures in place that address people’s concerns.”
Southern Lehigh School District policy addresses community complaints on every level, but is not specific to library books, Superintendent Michael Mahon said. He added that Southern Lehigh is looking at policies to handle potential future library book complaints.
“In many places, there is, as in Central Bucks, a discussion about a process of determining what stays and what goes based on complaints,” he said.
“I think we have a predisposition not to pull books from shelves,” Mahon said. “But in the same way, we recognize that we could have books that are misplaced by age, inappropriate for age levels or whatever it is, and so we would take those things seriously.”
Mahon said districts have to strike a balance between respecting parents who want to introduce some topics at home and having books available to serve diverse communities.
When it comes to concerns that strict library policies across the country are targeting LGBT and race-related content, Mahon said there are extremes on both sides of the issue that cause division in school communities.
“My hope is that in dealing with this in a thoughtful way, [we can recognize] that there are legitimate concerns on both sides of the issue that we have to manage thoughtfully and respectfully, and hopefully, wisely,” he said.
A statewide push
The situation may be taken out of local districts’ hands.
The Pennsylvania Senate this summer passed a bill that would have districts notify parents of “sexually explicit” content in books or coursework available to students, and allow parents to prevent their child from viewing the material and seek an alternative. The bill awaits a vote in the state House as legislators return to Harrisburg this month.
Local administrators said such a law could be hard for districts to implement because of the ambiguity around what is “sexually explicit,” as well as the difficulty in reviewing all books in all district libraries.
“I will never say that we should not be careful about the age-appropriate content that we expose our students to,” Mahon said. “A broadbased prohibition against books in a library, I think, would require just a note of caution there.”
For Kovalchik, national and statewide discussions about book bans are just another way public schools are landing in the center of a political maelstrom.
“Schools are a microcosm of society,” Kovalchik said. “Everybody has their views and thoughts, which is fine, but then that filters into the school system.”