School board members in Carmel are split on whether the district’s policy for reviewing and removing books from campus libraries is adequate or should be tightened up.
The Carmel Clay Schools board of trustees spent the final 45 minutes of its Aug. 12 meeting discussing Policy 5522, which governs selection, review and removal of school library materials. The board updated the policy in December 2023 to comply with changes to state law, including a new requirement that school boards have the final say on whether a book in question is removed.
In June, the board voted 3-2 to keep the memoir “All Boys Aren’t Blue” in the Carmel High School library after a community member requested it be removed. At that meeting, school board member Greg Brown, who voted in favor of removing the book along with school board member Louise Jackson, requested the board discuss the policy and how it is implemented at a future meeting.
During the Aug. 12 meeting, Brown described the existing policy as “polarizing” and said he would prefer to see controversial books moved to a separate area where they could be viewed by children with parental permission instead of being removed entirely. He suggested the board form a committee to review the policy and examine how controversial books are handled in other school districts. He also suggested controversial books be rated or identified as such.
“I’m looking at it from the parent perspective that wants a little more control over their child,” he said. “They know their child better than anyone else and know what they’re struggling with, and I think we need to honor their rights, as well.”
Parents can view a list of materials available at school libraries online and can request their child not be permitted to check out certain titles. But Jackson shared Brown’s concern that any student can pull any book off a library shelf and read it there without checking it out, including material some parents would not want their children to view.
“Even with our sexual education program, we send a permission slip home to parents, because we want them to know what we’re going to be teaching. And there is nobody on this board that would say – in the books that we’ve talked about that have a sexual nature – that that’s not graphic content,” Jackson said. “So, if we would not share that content in a sexual education class, if we would not share that content in a language arts book, in a math book, no way should we allow students to be able to walk into a library and pull that scene off the shelf.”
Jackson requested that school librarians increase screening for sexually graphic content before books are placed in school libraries and asked the board to consider implementing a process to keep students from accessing those types of books within a library without parental permission.
School board member Jennifer Nelson-Williams said she doesn’t feel books should be removed because they include content that is difficult or upsetting to some, a measure she said is subjective and can turn into a “slippery slope.”
“This is a conversation that is broader or more important than controlling a book,” she said. “I think the first level of low-hanging fruit is sexual content, that is the way these conversations begin, and then it’s death by 1,000 papercuts. (One could say,) ‘You said you didn’t like the sexual books, can’t we all agree those slavery books are uncomfortable? Those should go, too, because we don’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable we have a history in this country of slavery. I would caution you to use the same intention you did for every other difficult subject matter with your children and use that as the guiding force.”
School board member Katie Browning said the review of “All Boys Aren’t Blue” showed that the district’s policy worked as intended. She said the review of the policy is “reinventing the wheel” and that the board has “bigger fish to fry.” In addition, she said she believes the district’s highly trained teachers and media specialists “would never compromise our students’ learning.”
“There is a level of trust that Carmel Clay Schools are hiring media specialists to pick things, and if we feel that what they selected is not appropriate, then that’s where the policy comes in,” Browning said. “And of course, we send our kids off into the day and we’re not standing there and we’re not following them. I feel like at a certain point we have to trust our district, we have to trust the media specialists, and if we don’t, if we feel a book has been selected we don’t agree with, there has to be a path to remove that, and that’s what I feel like we have.”
Jackson and Nelson-Williams, the board’s policy liaisons, will work with Amy Dudley, CCS assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, to review suggestions made during the discussion.
