Censorship continued.

[Tom Ross <tross@AITKIN.K12.MN.US>]

You guys are great.

Your answers back gladdened my heart and have encouraged me to do what I felt was 
the right thing in the first place. Overwhelmingly the reply about whether-or-not 
to include these books on Creationism fell into favor of including them and 
assinging them to the Religion section of my Media Center. I may face a little 
harrassment from my superintendent who really dislikes these people because so many 
of them are home schoolers, but It think all I would have to do is show him your 
replys and he would feel compelled to accept the fact that we have to include as 
many differing points of view as possible as long as they fall within the 
guidelines of our selection policy.

I have collected everybodys response in a MS Word file and would be glad to send it 
to anybody who ask. If I posted everything it would fill a whole digest on LM Net. 
Some of it did show up in the LM Net discussion, about half of it in fact. I found 
very few who did not support the concept of inclusion and even then they did so 
only if the books did not attack other people points of view. I felt I would still 
have to include the books even if they did attack other people points of view, 
because then I would have to exclude many other books that attack other points of 
view. ie. anti-communist/pro-communist books anti-religion-pro-religion, or even 
anti-specific religion-pro-specific religion. I think it's better to let the 
students read and make up their own minds.

One thing I did realize that many of us as Library/Media Specialist tend to be a 
little more libertarian than the rest of the general population when it comes to 
the "Market Place of Ideas" that Chief Justice Oliver Wendal Holms spoke about. I 
do wonder though,if everybody is agreeing to include the materials, why did the 
Apple Valley Media Specialist bring wittness after wittness to their school boards 
in an attempt to exclude these books from their own Library/Media Centers.

Look for yourself, expecially those of you who replied and identified themselves as 
teachers and professors. The whole battle is fought out in 17 hits from the minutes 
of the school board meetings. The books identified in these minutes, by the way, 
are some of the books you folks recommended I consider to plug this gap in my 
collection. They sound anti-Darwinistic or anti-Darwinian or anti-Darwins theory, 
but I have no problem with that, I was "anti-Reganomics" and "trickle down theory" 
and included books that shared both points of view. Here is the web site:
http://www.isd196.k12.mn.us/Search/ISD196Search.html
Do a keyword search: " Darwin"
Then follow the Minutes and you will see that Media Specialist were the ones 
fighting for exclusion. It looks like after a year the school board kept one book 
and excluded the other. Both books went to the reconsideration committee and the 
committees recommended the inclusion of both books at each building. (This was a 
multi-building event). The Media Specialist and Staff were apparently fighting it 
all the way.

Thanks again for replying folks. I feel a lot more confident about facing these 
kinds of issues.

Tom

 I was swamped with classes yesterday and unable to reply individually, but I will 
attempt to do so today

Tom Ross
Director of Library/Media
Aitkin Public Schools
306 2nd St. NW
Aitkin, MN  56431
218-927-2115 ext. 207
tross@aitkin.k12.mn.us

Fax Wave 209-882-5565

"Another day, another reason to be thankful."   :-)

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