As I was reading through the recent edition of School Pages, I was thrilled to see, front and center, the following quote:
“Working together - our dedicated staff, supportive families, and vibrant community - creates a culture of trust and encouragement”.
I fully support this sentiment, but the truth is that trust cannot happen without transparency and accountability. I believe the school board and district have a prime opportunity here to rebuild their trust with families and the community by revising the Library Materials policy so that:
And the need for transparency and accountability is very real. With the state legislature passing the controversial Ban on Book Bans law, this further concentrates material selection and removal authority with the media directors. In fact, the original language called for stripping school boards from having final authority on library materials. If measures such as this do become law someday, sunlight is the only disinfectant against indoctrination and discrimination.
But the reality is that problems are already here. Case in point is the book donations made by BPA back in February. We donated a total of 12 elementary book titles, 5 middle school titles, and 5 high-school titles. These were new titles so understandably the media center needed to evaluate them against their selection criteria. It is now September and only the elementary book titles have just completed their evaluation. And I was honestly shocked that there were a few titles that were not accepted - I have copies of those books here with me so I would love to share these with you. The only explanation given so far, was that they may not be “high need”. I did reach out to get a definition of “high-need” since that is not a selection criteria mentioned in the Materials policy.
We were also told that no report on evaluations of donated books is provided. In the past, I have also asked for evaluations on materials selected by the media directors, but there does not appear to be any documentation for that either.
So this is what we’ve learned about the library material selection process over the last several months: there is no documentation or record-keeping, additional criteria are being used besides that contained in policy, and although the media directors report up to the Technology Director, there are no meaningful oversight or compliance processes in place.
This does not create a culture of trust. Just the opposite - it undermines the credibility of the experts we want to trust, which discourages parents from enrolling their children, and pushes good teachers out of the district.
Please fix the Library Materials policy to build back better trust with your stakeholders.
