It’s apparently not enough that the right-wing activists who control the Francis Howell School Board removed a statement of racial tolerance from school hallways, tried to shutter Black literature and history courses and canceled a video teaching series it deemed too “woke.â€
In its latest descent into glowering self-parody, the board’s reactionary majority is moving to take direct control over what books can be stocked on school library shelves, using only vaguely worded standards that could conceivably ban anything this side of Dr. Suess.
What’s next, a book bonfire in the schoolyard?
As the Post-Dispatch’s Monica Obradovic reports, the board plans a vote next month on proposals that would fundamentally shift oversight of school library collections from teachers and librarians to the school board members themselves, empowered by any random resident who wants to challenge any book.
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One proposal would allow any member of the public to ask the board to remove books that are, in their opinion, “obscene,†“vulgar†or lack “educational suitability.†Another, similarly overbroad proposal would bar mention in books of drug use, violence or profanity.
Materials that would pretty obviously be yanked from school shelves under the proposals would include books popular with young readers, like the Harry Potter series, which features a menacing central villain who “must not be named.â€
With these policies, the district would have a whole list of books that must not be named.
The five right-wing members of the seven-member board were elected as part of an organized culture-war incursion against school boards throughout the region and the nation in the past few years. Their agenda is to stamp out any discussion of race, gender or any other topic that challenges their own worldview. Their contempt for professional educators is evident in just about everything they do.
These latest proposals are an especially galling example of that. Teachers and school librarians are among the most valuable and undervalued members of society. They are professionals who wouldn’t do what they do if they didn’t care first and foremost about children’s education.
The suggestion that those educators must be second-guessed on the micro-level of deciding what books to shelve by elected demagogues who don’t necessarily have the slightest background in education — let alone by any random resident with an ideological ax to grind — is so galling that we hesitate to even mention the logistical quagmire on offer here.
But that quagmire is real. School board members are supposed to focus on things like budget and staffing decisions, not reviewing every decision made by teachers in the classrooms and school libraries. With any resident able to start that process, it’s easy to predict a future in which board members spend every meeting passing targeted books back and forth and parsing whether this or that passage qualifies as overly vulgar or violent.
That kind of gatekeeper function is legitimate in schools, but it’s the job of teachers and librarians. Those professionals have given no indication of some systemic failure on that front. This is simply the board’s ideologues being ideologues.
The Francis Howell board should trust the professional educators of the district to do their jobs. If they aren’t — and if the board has specific evidence of that failure — they should replace them. Turning the school board into a censorship board isn’t the solution to any actual problem in education today.
The April defeat of two culture-war candidates for open seats on the board by two mainstream candidates was a hopeful sign that this trend of politicizing school boards is petering out. Future elections offer hope. But for now, Francis Howell is stuck with this book-banning brigade.
The board generally meets the third Thursday of each month in O’Fallon, Missouri. We encourage parents and district residents to show up at board meetings and peacefully remind the board members that their job is to promote learning, not to restrict it.