@Book Bans - What if They Aren't Terrible? spoiler: they are

[Bad Dingo]

I just wish that any of the public schools that DD has attended even had a library let alone a librarian to curate books (Debbie Downer? Womp womp).

[chedifuen]

All reading is good reading. All book bans are bad. That is my very simplistic thoughts on this topic.

[pixy0stix]

Jan 9, 2024 14:59:52 GMT -5 Vespasia said:

This thread resurrected a memory I had totally forgotten about. I had multiple ankle surgeries when I was 12 so I went to the library during gym (score!). One of the things they had me do was read books they were considering buying for the library and then make a recommendation.

I had so much power!
 

So much cooler than them having me go through and pull the outdated cards from the card catalog system, lol!

[notreal]

Jan 9, 2024 13:04:40 GMT -5 ssmjlm said:

I mean Colleen Hoover is a crap writer and I hate that Tik Tok made her popular again, but I mean, reading is also reading. Should my daughter want to read one of her books, we would talk more about how the author romaticizes abusive relationships and that's not real life.

I remember reading an assigned book twice in MS/HS where the chauffeur kills a young girl he's driving around and stuffs her body into the incinerator. Looking back I wonder how that got put on a reading list not once, but twice.

I am assuming this book is Native Son by Richard Wright.  It's always on the list of banned books in the US.  It's also considered one of the great protest novels so it gets challenged a lot.

[ssmjlm]

Jan 9, 2024 16:22:57 GMT -5 notreal said:

Jan 9, 2024 13:04:40 GMT -5 ssmjlm said:

I mean Colleen Hoover is a crap writer and I hate that Tik Tok made her popular again, but I mean, reading is also reading. Should my daughter want to read one of her books, we would talk more about how the author romaticizes abusive relationships and that's not real life.

I remember reading an assigned book twice in MS/HS where the chauffeur kills a young girl he's driving around and stuffs her body into the incinerator. Looking back I wonder how that got put on a reading list not once, but twice.

I am assuming this book is Native Son by Richard Wright.  It's always on the list of banned books in the US.  It's also considered one of the great protest novels so it gets challenged a lot.

Yes, that's it! Well I got to read it twice growing in Maryland during the 90s. So it wasn't banned yet.

[noodleoo]

Jan 9, 2024 15:55:18 GMT -5 hermione said:

Jan 9, 2024 15:37:37 GMT -5 noodleoo said:

Wait, what?  You think Harry Potter should need parental permission for kids to check out?  Why?

The second example I understand, but Harry Potter?

I think she’s saying to have a restricted section like Harry Potter did not that Harry Potter should be restricted.

Still, no. Restricted sections aren’t the answer. It’s still censorship. It’s not up to librarians to tell your kids they need permission to read something. That’s a parent’s job. If your kid checks out something you’ve told them not to, that’s an issue between the parent and kid that has nothing to do with the library or librarian. Our jobs are literally to provide access not limit it.

LOL oh I get it! Oops, carry on.

[erbear]

25-year veteran middle school teacher: I'm (obviously) team whatever gets kids reading is great. I teach in a school where a book ban would be laughable (I ran a TIC "subversive book" club a couple of years ago with 26 kid and their parents) but I'm never in support of them. Kids will read much more explicit things online, and most of the time with visuals. Books allow them to experience it in their own time.

School librarians are highly trained professionals and I trust them to stock the library with books that are appropriate for kids. My school has a middle and high school library (same space), but there is a clear "middle school" section. The other books are in there, but most kids stick to their section. 

The real issue is with what's being banned. There are plenty of "explicit" books out there that aren't being challenged, because the sexual nature of them in cis-het. It's always fascinating that folks like MFL only see sex when it comes to gay sex. It's almost like it's not about the books at all...

Anyway, team read all the things. Parents need to parent. They need to talk to their kids. If you want to ban your kid from reading a book, that's your right (though the best way to get a kid to read something is to say they can't...) but you don't get the right to make that choice for other kids.

Finally, to the point of the Berlin Wall book -- books like that, written on a middle school level -- are game-changers for kids. They allow for real, tough conversations in a controlled environment with a trained professional, and they build empathy and awareness. I teach some hard texts (Prisoner B in 7th grade, Number the Stars in 5th, Refugee and Everything Sad is Untrue in 6th, Copper Sun in 8th) and kids are changed by the experience -- they often talk about those books as eye-opening when they are in high school. I encourage parents to read them along with their kids and talk about it.  Most kids can and should handle tough things.

[laladypoet]

Jan 9, 2024 14:29:54 GMT -5 wawa said:

Jan 9, 2024 14:22:03 GMT -5 laladypoet said:

this thread is fucking weird.

thanks for your input?

I was going to ask if this was written by drunk AI but didn't want to be rude

[ny96]

Jan 9, 2024 11:35:48 GMT -5 hermione said:

My kid can read anything she wants. Full stop. You don't get to deny her access to materials because you feel differently about your kid.

As for why a librarian would give limited space to any title, only the librarian (who is often a mastered degree professional who took graduate level classes in collection development) can answer that for her specific library and students.

Totally agree. There are some books that I’m not thrilled my kids are reading like some of the Manga my 5th grader consumes. However, I strongly believe that if he’s reading he can read whatever he wants, full stop. If they are watching I’m going to put some limits on programming, but their reading is unrestricted.

[devonpow]

Jan 9, 2024 15:37:37 GMT -5 noodleoo said:

Jan 9, 2024 12:24:00 GMT -5 devonpow said:

I read Clan of the Cave Bear, Lord of the Flies (gave me more nightmares than any other book), a TON of Stephen King, “Wifey” (stolen from my mom lol), and who knows what else before I was 10. Both my kids (now 11 and 16) can read whatever they want - I just want them to read. For both of them I got them a lot of books on sex and puberty that explain everything from body hair to anal sex. I’m sure somewhere those books are banned.

Book bans are always terrible. Some books I agree with things like being in a restricted section a la Harry Potter where you need parental permission to access (my high school library - private school - did this. I recall one in high school was the book “final exit” which is about euthanasia/dying with dignity and includes instructions for completing suicide. I wrote a paper about it and needed my parents permission to check it out. That is 100% reasonable - still having access but understanding the type of book a parent might want to be involved in the decision making for).

Wait, what?  You think Harry Potter should need parental permission for kids to check out?  Why?

The second example I understand, but Harry Potter?

sorry lol - I meant the restricted section referenced in the Harry Potter books, where they had to get a teachers note to access. I can see how that was interpreted the wrong way!

[elleblue]

Jan 9, 2024 10:35:21 GMT -5 wawa said:

Like...I know we all read Clan of the Cave Bear or VC Andrews or regency romances we snagged off our parent's shelves when we were probably younger than ideal for them. they weren't at the school library, were they?? I guess I never looked for them there.

My sophomore English Lit teacher handed Clan of the Cave Bear to me, I think of of her classroom shelf? I was definitely (deliciously) scandalized. 😆

[lostrn]

Jan 9, 2024 12:26:53 GMT -5 wanderingback said:

Also, I say this often but wow people’s memory amazes me lol. I don’t remember what I read 2 years ago, let alone when I was in middle or high school!

I have a terrible memory, truly, but I do distinctly remember being on vacation with my grandparents, my dad's unmarried sisters and brother and my cousins. And my slightly older cousin and my grandmother both reading one of the Flowers in the Attic books and talking about it being good. Which made me, probably 11-12 years old, find it at the library when I got home lol.

I also remember my 9th grade science teacher confiscating my copy of America Psycho during class and telling me I couldn't read it at school.

[fumbalina]

Jan 9, 2024 11:16:15 GMT -5 Jalapeñomel said:

I absolutely checked out VC Andrews from the school library.

The only thing my parents didn't limit was books. I couldn't watch rated PG-13/R movies or listen to certain types of music, but I could read any book I wanted.

Don't ban books from libraries.

The sneaking off the bookshelf seemed odd to me but my mother handed me her copy as something for me to read lol. She also preemptively gave me all the questions about sex you were afraid to ask. Additionally, I had a 30 minute pop quiz on birth control with her take on when and how they fail, along with her vast personal experience. This extended to other less than appropriate age items, sick as R movies in the theatre at 8 with my 5yr old brother. She wouldn't go since she couldn't smoke, so we were supervised by my 16 year old sister lol.

I can't say I was a sheltered child in the least.

[aurora]

Jan 9, 2024 13:20:39 GMT -5 InBetweenDays said:

Growing up I took part in the Junior Great Books. In 6th grade we read Ray Bradbury's The Veldt which is a science fiction short story about a family living in an automated house. The house does everything for them, and includes a virtual reality nursery that transports the kids into a very lifelike African savannah. When the parents try to "turn off" the house and suggest they move the kids rebel, lock the parents in the nursery, where it is implied that the parents are eaten by lions. Crazy story for a 6th grader? Maybe, but has stuck with me for 39 years and started me on my path of loving to read.

I read The Veldt in high school and still had nightmares and remember it vividly ~30 years later. That one and Shirley Jackson's The Lottery.

I don't regret either of them for a second, though.

[aurora]

Jan 9, 2024 13:35:19 GMT -5 wawa said:

Jan 9, 2024 13:27:14 GMT -5 pixy0stix said:

Trigger though for the first book in that it's rape, not sex.

ah - that's the whole first book?  That makes sense.  for series I never remember where one book ends and the other begins.  especially if they're really long books. 

related musing - Do school libraries do anything with trigger warnings?  Like if a kid is just perusing the shelves, is there anything to tell them if a book has some common triggers?

I still remember my Mom initially giving me permission to read Clan of the Cave Bear but not the others because of the sex (I was 10 or so? I started reading big books early) and then ending up in a conversation with her friend in front of me discussing it. The eventually takeaway was that it's important to read about healthy, consensual sex. That discussion was a good life lesson to me in the end, even if I was still pretty young and not an active participant.

[minzy]

Sort of a tangent but I volunteer with a group that sells donated books. We weed out the smelly ones and some of the old or damaged ones, but I have always taken the position that we should not weed them out for content. One of the other volunteers will toss sexually explicit ones but I don’t think that’s my call to make, even for a sale to the general public which might include kids. I did pause on one that was in German and seemed like it might have been pro-Hitler but I can’t remember what we did with that one… I think we had someone who could read German confirm that it wasn’t Nazi propaganda and still put it out for sale. I’m not entirely sure how I would have handled that if it was.

[sillygoosegirl]

I honestly wonder about this somewhat myself. I got a book out last year (from the public library, not a school library) on teaching reading. I wasn't expecting it to be a book on 3-cueing, but it was (ie a big long instruction manual on teaching reading using methods like, "look at the picture and make a guess). This is a method of teaching reading that has been totally debunked by science, yet continues to hurt many children today is it is still very commonly used in schools. I knew it was BS, but will the next person who checks it out because they are desparately trying to figure out how to teach their dyslexic child to read? I had checked this book out because a different book by the same author was being talked up in some science of reading groups, but was unavailable at the library at the time. On doing further research on this author, I learned that he does not believe the BS he put in that early book anymore.

I was sorely tempted to drop the book in the recycling rather than the book return slot, I have to say.

Surely at some point the librarians are supposed to make some decisions on what books are worthy of taking up space on the shelves, right? There's some real junk out there, and some of it really doesn't deserve to be in circulation anymore.

I know there's slippery slope arguments, and who's to decide which books have the junk science, but at the end of the day, there are a lot of titles my library doesn't have for a variety of reasons. Libraries do in fact have to pick and choose what books to buy and retain.

[sonrisa]

Jan 9, 2024 17:24:31 GMT -5 erbear said:

The real issue is with what's being banned. There are plenty of "explicit" books out there that aren't being challenged, because the sexual nature of them in cis-het. It's always fascinating that folks like MFL only see sex when it comes to gay sex. It's almost like it's not about the books at all...

.

ding ding ding. Wawa: did you see that 28% of what they are banning was LGBTQIA+? If they banned 16-17ish LGBTQIA books, that was probably a huge percentage of thier LGBTQIA+ offerings. And it wasn’t even something like Gender Queer (which is fantastic but does have one or two panels that my 4th grader isn’t ready for.)

[jinkies]

Jan 9, 2024 23:18:56 GMT -5 sillygoosegirl said:

Surely at some point the librarians are supposed to make some decisions on what books are worthy of taking up space on the shelves, right? There's some real junk out there, and some of it really doesn't deserve to be in circulation anymore.

I know there's slippery slope arguments, and who's to decide which books have the junk science, but at the end of the day, there are a lot of titles my library doesn't have for a variety of reasons. Libraries do in fact have to pick and choose what books to buy and retain.

Yes, and I trust my kid's school librarian to manage the books that are available without me micromanaging them. I think there's a difference between you pointing out to a librarian, "hey this book has incorrect information, and even the author has changed his stance on these methods, you may want to consider pulling it" and the M4L desire to scare the public about children learning that sex exists.

Our district made national news the past couple years (discussed more than once on this forum) after being taken over by Moms for Liberty school board members, and instituting book bans and passing several anti-lgbtq policies.

It seemed like their entire goal was to cause instability and sow public distrust of the schools and teachers. Pulling out scandalous passages from books and claiming that the schools were corrupting our children was one of their tactics. I honestly think their ultimate goal was to encourage support for school choice/ school voucher systems so they could move their kids to private schools.

Meanwhile my middle school son was being exposed to real-life drugs, sex, and violence at school almost daily. Every kid has a phone in their pocket that can expose them to even more. Books would not even crack the top 50 things I worry about for him and his peers. The whole book banning thing was a huge distraction from the actual serious issues in our district, and our kids suffered.

In our district it was a huge waste of time, resources and energy and ultimately felt like a distraction tactic to keep people from looking into other things the school board was trying to do (which are only coming out now that they have been voted out).

[Velar Fricative]

Jan 9, 2024 23:18:56 GMT -5 sillygoosegirl said:

I honestly wonder about this somewhat myself. I got a book out last year (from the public library, not a school library) on teaching reading. I wasn't expecting it to be a book on 3-cueing, but it was (ie a big long instruction manual on teaching reading using methods like, "look at the picture and make a guess). This is a method of teaching reading that has been totally debunked by science, yet continues to hurt many children today is it is still very commonly used in schools. I knew it was BS, but will the next person who checks it out because they are desparately trying to figure out how to teach their dyslexic child to read? I had checked this book out because a different book by the same author was being talked up in some science of reading groups, but was unavailable at the library at the time. On doing further research on this author, I learned that he does not believe the BS he put in that early book anymore.

I was sorely tempted to drop the book in the recycling rather than the book return slot, I have to say.

Surely at some point the librarians are supposed to make some decisions on what books are worthy of taking up space on the shelves, right? There's some real junk out there, and some of it really doesn't deserve to be in circulation anymore.

I know there's slippery slope arguments, and who's to decide which books have the junk science, but at the end of the day, there are a lot of titles my library doesn't have for a variety of reasons. Libraries do in fact have to pick and choose what books to buy and retain.

Eh, it's not that simple. It could get dicey if you have a librarian themself who has their own personal convictions about what is worthy and what isn't. Every public library (and likely school library) has or should have a collections policy followed by every staff regardless of personal convictions to ensure that there is a variety of materials available because the last thing we want to be accused of is censorship by not buying what people seem to want to read. 

Having said that, I'm a librarian and I have never heard of 3-cueing until this post. I can't speak for the particular library that book was found and how they acquire their materials, but in this particular case you should feel absolutely free and encouraged to speak to a librarian or a supervisor at the library to offer feedback about this book. We always take feedback into account and consider whether a book should remain on our shelves or not. I'm not saying they definitely would have decided to remove the book from the collection upon further review, but public libraries generally do welcome this kind of dialogue with patrons. 

[hermione]

Jan 9, 2024 23:18:56 GMT -5 sillygoosegirl said:

I honestly wonder about this somewhat myself. I got a book out last year (from the public library, not a school library) on teaching reading. I wasn't expecting it to be a book on 3-cueing, but it was (ie a big long instruction manual on teaching reading using methods like, "look at the picture and make a guess). This is a method of teaching reading that has been totally debunked by science, yet continues to hurt many children today is it is still very commonly used in schools. I knew it was BS, but will the next person who checks it out because they are desparately trying to figure out how to teach their dyslexic child to read? I had checked this book out because a different book by the same author was being talked up in some science of reading groups, but was unavailable at the library at the time. On doing further research on this author, I learned that he does not believe the BS he put in that early book anymore.

I was sorely tempted to drop the book in the recycling rather than the book return slot, I have to say.

Surely at some point the librarians are supposed to make some decisions on what books are worthy of taking up space on the shelves, right? There's some real junk out there, and some of it really doesn't deserve to be in circulation anymore.

I know there's slippery slope arguments, and who's to decide which books have the junk science, but at the end of the day, there are a lot of titles my library doesn't have for a variety of reasons. Libraries do in fact have to pick and choose what books to buy and retain.

Your comparing apples and dogs. Pointing out a nonfiction book is outdated is not the same as saying I don't want this book on a library shelf because there are gay characters.

[macmars45]

No book bans.

I struggled to learn to read. Once it clicked I read so much! By 12/13 I was reading books definitely not aimed at my age group. My parents never put any limits on what I could or couldn't read. My mom would read at least one book from every series I read just to see what I was reading about.

[wawa]

Jan 9, 2024 23:30:22 GMT -5 sonrisa said:

Jan 9, 2024 17:24:31 GMT -5 erbear said:

The real issue is with what's being banned. There are plenty of "explicit" books out there that aren't being challenged, because the sexual nature of them in cis-het. It's always fascinating that folks like MFL only see sex when it comes to gay sex. It's almost like it's not about the books at all...

.

ding ding ding. Wawa: did you see that 28% of what they are banning was LGBTQIA+? If they banned 16-17ish LGBTQIA books, that was probably a huge percentage of thier LGBTQIA+ offerings. And it wasn’t even something like Gender Queer (which is fantastic but does have one or two panels that my 4th grader isn’t ready for.)

I did see that.  When I first posted this I'd only read the Banner article in the OP, and had quickly grabbed the other two for non-paywalled options. The deep dive on type of content is enlightening.

I also think it's interesting (aka sneaky bullshit) that MoL is all like, 'we're just flagging explicit content! no other agenda!"  FWIW - the ones that caught my eye as "ok, but why are those in the school library in the first place?" are largely (entirely?) cis-het.  it's been a minute but pretty sure ACOTAR has like, some bi content?  IIRC? But that's just me defending myself when I've already copped to being entirely wrong for having a "maybe it's ok to ban SOME books" moment so...meh to that I guess. 

[maudefindlay]

Several of the books the book banners here are wanting removed have been on the shelves for several years. Also, when it comes down to it they are targeting books with gay and transgender lead characters. I trust our school
librarians.

[wawa]

Jan 10, 2024 9:22:04 GMT -5 Velar Fricative said:

Jan 9, 2024 23:18:56 GMT -5 sillygoosegirl said:

I honestly wonder about this somewhat myself. I got a book out last year (from the public library, not a school library) on teaching reading. I wasn't expecting it to be a book on 3-cueing, but it was (ie a big long instruction manual on teaching reading using methods like, "look at the picture and make a guess). This is a method of teaching reading that has been totally debunked by science, yet continues to hurt many children today is it is still very commonly used in schools. I knew it was BS, but will the next person who checks it out because they are desparately trying to figure out how to teach their dyslexic child to read? I had checked this book out because a different book by the same author was being talked up in some science of reading groups, but was unavailable at the library at the time. On doing further research on this author, I learned that he does not believe the BS he put in that early book anymore.

I was sorely tempted to drop the book in the recycling rather than the book return slot, I have to say.

Surely at some point the librarians are supposed to make some decisions on what books are worthy of taking up space on the shelves, right? There's some real junk out there, and some of it really doesn't deserve to be in circulation anymore.

I know there's slippery slope arguments, and who's to decide which books have the junk science, but at the end of the day, there are a lot of titles my library doesn't have for a variety of reasons. Libraries do in fact have to pick and choose what books to buy and retain.

Eh, it's not that simple. It could get dicey if you have a librarian themself who has their own personal convictions about what is worthy and what isn't. Every public library (and likely school library) has or should have a collections policy followed by every staff regardless of personal convictions to ensure that there is a variety of materials available because the last thing we want to be accused of is censorship by not buying what people seem to want to read. 

Having said that, I'm a librarian and I have never heard of 3-cueing until this post. I can't speak for the particular library that book was found and how they acquire their materials, but in this particular case you should feel absolutely free and encouraged to speak to a librarian or a supervisor at the library to offer feedback about this book. We always take feedback into account and consider whether a book should remain on our shelves or not. I'm not saying they definitely would have decided to remove the book from the collection upon further review, but public libraries generally do welcome this kind of dialogue with patrons. 

So the one of the results of this banning spree for this specific jurisdiction is going to be an written policy for the district on explicit material.  Is that a typical part of a collections policy?  Feels like maybe no? 

[Michelle]

I don't support book bans. Periodt.

I trust masters prepared librarians to make qualified determinations about book selections in their libraries.

[lilac05]

I agree with those who say we should trust our school librarians…when we’re fortunate enough to have them. Our “librarian” is actually a former teacher, but I trust her fully to select books for the age of the students in the school.

I agree with others that kids see FAR more on their phones/computers than in books…even the ones whose parents think they have everything “locked down.” Between smart kids, burner phones, and friends’ phones, kids have access to basically everything all the time.

But also, I can totally empathize with the “How is my tiny baby old enough for this???” I’m especially that way with my youngest who is 10. He still enjoys reading Elephant & Piggy AND he’s old enough to be reading tough stuff. It’s a weird age! It’s not that I don’t think he can or should be reading these things, but it’s just that sometimes I can’t believe he doesn’t need me to slice his grapes in half anymore.

[Nonny]

Jan 9, 2024 22:37:11 GMT -5 minzy said:

Sort of a tangent but I volunteer with a group that sells donated books. We weed out the smelly ones and some of the old or damaged ones, but I have always taken the position that we should not weed them out for content. One of the other volunteers will toss sexually explicit ones but I don’t think that’s my call to make, even for a sale to the general public which might include kids. I did pause on one that was in German and seemed like it might have been pro-Hitler but I can’t remember what we did with that one… I think we had someone who could read German confirm that it wasn’t Nazi propaganda and still put it out for sale. I’m not entirely sure how I would have handled that if it was.

I'm also involved with my library's donated book sales, and generally we only toss things that we know we can't sell (old, stinky, damaged, and so out of date that it's irrelevant). That being said, we once got several books that were from Bill Gothard/IBLP and I chucked those without a second glance because I wasn't going to sell religious propaganda that promotes child abuse. I'm not even sorry. (FWIW, you can't get those books from our library system either.)

I also threw out one of Bill Cosby's books during his rape trial. No one want wanted to act as a censor on that one, but also no one wanted to actually put the book on our sale shelves, so it sat in the back room for weeks taking up our precious, limited space. Finally, I was like this is stupid, and chucked it. I'm not sorry about that either.

[nsl]

Jan 9, 2024 11:43:12 GMT -5 wawa said:

Jan 9, 2024 11:35:48 GMT -5 hermione said:

My kid can read anything she wants. Full stop. You don't get to deny her access to materials because you feel differently about your kid.

As for why a librarian would give limited space to any title, only the librarian (who is often a mastered degree professional who took graduate level classes in collection development) can answer that for her specific library and students.

I totally agree on your second line - I was actually hoping we had a school librarian here who could share some insight about how they balance different factors because it wouldn't be a shock if that happened here. 

Hi, resident school librarian clocking in. So yes, in most districts there is (or should be) a clear and consistent collection development policy that outlines the expectations that district leadership have set for how/why materials are selected for library purchases. That leadership typically includes at least one highly experienced and trained librarian who oversees every library in the district. In a perfect world every school also has a librarian with teaching experience and a master's degree in library science. In reality, the last 2-3 years have revealed how many of us were not working with any policy at all, were vastly undertrained, and yes in many cases there were age-inappropriate materials in school libraries that had content even the librarians in charge of collection development weren't aware of. As a profession, we have relied on "I trust my school librarian 100%" for a very long time, and the pushback against some books in school libraries hasn't been entirely unwarranted. 

FWIW, I taught secondary English for 16 years and have been a high school librarian for two years. I have a master's in library and information science. I've taught in four states and five districts, ranging from wildly liberal to largely conservative. My current district is the latter, and I currently live/work in Utah. My feelings about this topic are very much informed by that background and experience.

To speak to one of the more problematic examples that has been mentioned in this thread, ACOTAR was shelved and reviewed extensively as YA by many outlets, so any shade cast needs to reflect the overall environment of publishing and reviewing, not just the lazy/inattentive/malicious librarian stereotype you often see when that particular series is mentioned. I don't think anyone in this thread is ascribing ill intent to their school librarians, but that's the rhetoric most people throw around when citing many of the examples mentioned, including ACOTAR.

Collection development training (in my experience--I had two classes in my MLIS program that dealt explicitly with selecting materials for K-12 students) includes knowing how to know which review sources to use. No one can possibly read enough new releases by themselves to select materials based on their own judgment alone, and the American Library Association has published review journals (Booklist, School Library Journal, and Library Journal are three that I use, but there are dozens more) for over 70 years to assist librarians in every type of library select materials. Many other professional review sources are out there--I also use Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus--and while they are all commercial ventures they also employ professionals with backgrounds in education, child development, and librarianship to make recommendations about which books are best-suited for different age groups/libraries and why. Many, many amateur review sources and sites also exist, and they often serve as our sole source of information about popular but less prestigious media. Manga, for example, has only gotten professional reviews in the "big" journals in the last 24 months. Over 60% of my circulation and book requests from students are manga. I use the amateurs I trust--largely other school librarians who read the genre and understand it well--to make decisions on which series to buy.

In addition to all of that input, we also have to know our school communities well to understand what will and won't circulate. What's in demand? What might kids be asking for in the next six months, and which titles might get a reluctant reader to put down their phone and pick up a book? Which titles might a teacher be able to use for a project? Which topics do our students need information sources on even if they're not reflected in circulation data (topics like gender/sexual identity, sexual health, alcoholism, etc... often don't circulate at all, but we know kids are reading them secretly in the stacks because we see disruption on the shelf). There's also the matter of school culture. Some titles circulate very well in my previous school because of the unique socioeconomic, racial, and cultural backgrounds of its students. Those same books don't get touched at all in my current school because its student body has a different makeup in spite of the fact that the two schools are just a mile apart. 

Additionally, I need to know where the demand is while also anticipating where demand will be in the future because once a book is on our shelves it's going to stay there for at least 10 years unless it's lost, damaged, or removed due to a successful challenge. My library needs to meet both current and future needs as best I can anticipate them.

We also take into account which information in our libraries is old/out of date/offensive and remove/replace books constantly. I've probably weeded 500 books from our nonfiction shelves already this year for those reasons. Some I replace with updated books, some I don't. For informational research we've moved almost 100% to online databases, so I don't bother wasting money on print resources that will be out of date a year from now if not sooner. Five years ago that wasn't part of the nonfiction collection development equation. Things change, and these days they change often.

I also read A TON and I know my readers and teachers very well. I flip through the pages of every manga or graphic novel I buy because I can tell from the art style alone sometimes which of my readers will want to read that book when it's on the shelf. I know based on a plot synopsis that Kid A is going to connect with a book, but Kid B will be made uncomfortable by a plot point and should be guided to a different title. I know that there's an 11th grade English teacher who wants her students to read books set in China/about Chinese characters while they study Joy Luck Club in class next semester, so I make a point of keeping two memoirs about women growing up in China during the mid-20th century (even though they should be weeded per our collection policy because they haven't been checked out in over a decade) because her kids will probably want them when that project gets announced.

What to buy, what to toss, what to keep, how to promote our collection, and how to manage expectations placed by all of our stakeholders is a full-time job. I know because it's my full time job. I'm incredibly fortunate that my district does not expect me to do any technology work, which is not the case for most school librarians these days. If I had to manage chromebooks as well as my library duties I wouldn't have time to do all of the above to make sure we had the high-quality collection I know we do. So at least some of the slippage in school library collection quality, if it exists, can be laid squarely at the feet of school leadership who don't see the value in librarianship for its own sake and want us to do every task under the sun except the ones we're trained for.

And yes, "pop" books are in high demand. I've been asked if we have Colleen Hoover books at least a dozen times in the last six weeks. We don't. Legally I can't. I'm in Utah, and this month my state legislature is going to try to float a bill that would get me criminally prosecuted for handing a kid 1984 (there's a SEX SCENE!), much less It Starts With Us. Kids ask for books, school librarians are overextended and/or are trying to boost reading in any way we can, publishers try to push the envelope of what Young Adult means because Twilight got grownups buying/reading it and demanding racier content, and books with adult-level sex scenes wind up on school library shelves. This whole problem has been brewing for well over a decade.

For those of you who have said you're against book banning altogether, what are you doing about it? Are you writing to your state-level representatives to discourage them from considering legislation restricting what's in school libraries? What about members of your state school board? Local school board? Have you contacted your kids' schools to ask if there are book challenges, and if so asking if your name can be added to the list of parents willing to serve on review committees? Are you talking to your friends and neighbors about why book banning is bad? We need so much more help than we are getting from the vast majority of American parents who agree with us that kids should have the right to read. Show up, please.

[sonrisa]

nsl: I’m not in an area where book banning is a thing. So ‘what I’m doing’ is on the opposite end of the spectrum. Every year, I try to check out the LGBTQIA+ picture books that had meaning for my kid in the past. Especially the ones we liked enough to buy a copy. I want to make sure they don’t get flagged for underuse just because the audience seeking them is small. There aren’t a lot of preschool and kindergarten age kids looking for trans representation. But for the kids who are, those books *really* matter.