As many of you know, I am in law school as well as teaching school library media
courses. This past summer I did a 10 week legal internship with the American Civil
Liberties Union of Texas. Regardless of your feelings for the ACLU in general, one
of the library-related things they do is to prepare a Banned Books report each
year, tracking the books that have been challenged or banned in the preceding
school year. Part of my job this summer was to compile that report. We send Freedom
of Information Act requests to every school district in the state requesting
information about all book challenges, then compile them into a statistical report.
This year's results were very interesting:
Challenges were up this year over last by 100%. Books banned (removed from the
library) were also up 100%.
Books were challenged for the expected language and sexual content reasons, but
some interesting ones appeared as well. A picture book about a cross-country train
ride was challenged because one of the picture showed a town, where townspeople
waved at the passing train, and someone in the local jail was waving from the
window. The objector felt that since jail is not an appropriate place to be, it
shouldn't be depicted in a book for children.
A large number of challenged books were obviously inappropriately selected. When
you see a Chris Crutcher book challenged in a primary school, you have to wonder
what the librarian who selected the book was thinking. When one of the comments to
another obviously inappropriate book indicated that AR status weighed in on the
decision to remove the book, the lightbulb went on! The book was selected for the
library because 1) the book had an AR test, and 2) the reading level of the book is
within the range of grades served by the campus. Obviously the selector had no
knowledge of YA literature, hadn't read any reviews of the book, and wasn't aware
that there is a type of book known as high interest-low vocabulary. It was selected
solely from the AR list. And what is even more compelling, many of these books were
selected by clerks who replaced librarians on campuses.
That has prompted me to expand my research into who selected these specific books,
and why. I hope this will lead to a post-graduate fellowship in which I can develop
advocacy materials to help administrators understand that legal challenges to
materials will result if unqualified persons are doing book selection.
Carol Simpson, Ed.D.
Assoc. Professor (mod. svc.)
School of Library & Information Sciences
University of North Texas
PO Box 311068
307 S. Avenue B, Suite 205
Denton, TX 76203
940-565-3776 (voice)
940-565-3101 (fax)
carol_simpson@unt.edu
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