The White County Central School District has updated its “challenge” policy after the state legislature passed a law earlier this year that would remove the exemption for schools and public libraries from prosecution “for the distribution of any writing, film, slide, drawing, or other visual reproduction alleged to be obscene”.
“We had the legislative session in the spring, which was a hot mess, and they decided to drag us [librarians] into it as well, but it really turned out not to be that bad,” Melanie Dickerson, the district’s librarian for grades 7-12, told the WCC school board last week. “What they asked us to do was to update our library policy, not necessarily our selection policy, but more our challenge policy, and that’s what this is. We had one in place but it was rather general and if we were challenged it really wouldn’t save the school at all. We would have a big headache.
The bill, signed into law by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders in May, would allow parents to “challenge the appropriateness” of school or library materials. House Bill 372 was blocked from taking effect by U.S. District Judge Timothy L. Brooks in late July.
While the new law is tied up in the court system, WCC kindergarten through sixth-grade librarian Alison Baird said the school district’s policy was “probably over 10 years old, and it was recommended that we be very general”. Superintendent Pharis Smith added that it was an “ASB [Arkansas School Board Association] policy, but it needed to be updated and Ms Melanie did that.
Before the board approved the adoption of the 2023 library media policies and procedures, Baird said she wanted to thank Dickerson for all of her hard work. “She’s really taken the lead on this,” Baird said. “I’ve been at the library longer than she has, but I’ll tell you, she came in at a time when it’s getting hairy to be a librarian.”
Dickerson said she went in and did major updates to the policy, not only to protect the school, but also to protect herself and Baird, because she said there were things in the law that could be bad for them if something happened.
Dickerson told the board that she and Baird had been entrusted to be the ones to choose the books, to use the curriculum, to use the needs of the students and the needs of the community.
“We keep our community in mind when we make our decisions,” Dickerson said. “The challenge policy itself gives us a step-by-step process of what would have to happen for someone to challenge it. The law also says that in order to challenge it, you have to be a patron of that library. So this would not allow anyone from outside Central to do it. If someone wanted to challenge a book in my library, it would have to be a 7-12 student, a parent or a faculty member.
For Baird, it would have to be a K-6 student, parent or faculty member. It couldn’t be another organisation that wanted to come in and look at the books in the library and challenge them. “So that saves the school some headaches there as well.”
If there were to be a challenge, Dickerson said, there would be a process by which a committee would be put together. For example, if the challenge was to Dickerson’s library, she wouldn’t be allowed to be on the committee, but Baird could be on that committee, along with some teachers, Smith, a principal and a parent.
“It would just take its steps,” Dickerson said. “Everybody would have to read the book in its entirety. They couldn’t just take excerpts from a book, so it would be a process, a due process. It would come down to whether this committee would recommend that it be taken off the shelves or whether it could stay. Obviously we can’t take it out of the library. It would have to go to a special section. That’s also part of the law, that we can’t take it out of the library. It would go to an 18-and-over shelf, and we can’t even take letters from parents to read that particular book if it’s pulled.
Board president Stan Yingling asked about some of the “good things” that come with the new policies and procedures. Dickerson replied, “The good thing is that it makes us update where we can’t just use a generic one or just say the suggested [policy]. It made us update and protect the school a little bit better.”
Baird added: “It’s amazing to me that I’ve been in the library for 14 years, but our school is changing and growing. It used to be that [if] a parent had a problem, they would call me at home and say ‘did you know this was in the book’ and I would surprise them and say ‘no’ because I can’t read every book on the shelf. We’d come to an agreement that made us both happy. I don’t know every parent. I don’t know their political leanings, so we really had to be proactive.
Smith said that before the policy change, anyone could come in and challenge a book. “It just protects us.”
Dickerson said that donated books are thoroughly checked before they are placed on the shelves. “I’ve only been here six years and I haven’t touched every book in my library,” Dickerson said. “So I’m not going to say I know everything that’s in there, because I don’t, but I’m working on it. There are almost 7,000 books in there. It is a lot of work, but it could be good for our school.