The Elizabeth School District in Elbert County is removing 19 books from its parental library shelves that officials deemed too controversial, including a book titled “It’s Your World – If You Don’t Like It, Change It: Activism for Teens .”
The new policy, first reported by Colorado Community Mediawas unanimously approved by the Elizabeth school board during a Monday meeting.
The books removed from the shelves are:
- “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas,
- “Thirteen Reasons Why” by Jay Asher,
- “#Pride: Standing Up for LGBTQ Rights” by Rebecca Felix,
- “You Should See Me in a Crown” by Leah Johnson,
- “It’s Your World – If You Don’t Like It, Change It: Activism for Teens” by Mikki Halpin,
- “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini,
- “Beloved” and “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison,
- “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky,
- “In Search of Alaska” by John Green,
- “Nineteen Minutes” by Jodi Picoult,
- “Speak” by Laurie Halse Anderson,
- ‘Identical’, ‘Fallout’, ‘Glass’, ‘Burned’, ‘Crank’ and ‘Smoke’ by Ellen Hopkins, and
- “George” by Alex Gino .
A curriculum review committee made up of school board members, school staff and Elizabeth community members turned to online resources such as banned book lists to determine which problematic books the four school libraries have, Mary Powell, an Elizabeth school board member on the curriculum review committee, said at the school board meeting . The committee then assessed the books for graphic violence, sexual content, profanity/obscenity, ideas about self-harm or mental illness, religious views, drug or excessive alcohol use and racism/discrimination.
Powell said the removed books contained “egregious” examples of those qualities.
“We need to make sure we protect our students from things that are controversial,” Powell said during the school board meeting.
The policy change also created a new level of school library books for “sensitive topics.” So far, the district’s curriculum review committee has designated more than 130 books as “sensitive.” If a student checks out one of the “sensitive” books, an email is sent to the student’s parents to alert them. The parent has the option to restrict their child’s library account, preventing the child from checking out books marked “sensitive.”
“We’ve talked about the rights and responsibilities of parents, and this is an important responsibility,” Powell said. “It is their right to know what their child is watching.”
Books on the ‘sensitive’ list include ‘1984’, ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’ by Anne Frank, ‘Killing a Mockingbird’, ‘The Hunger Games’, ‘Understanding Islam’ and the Bible.
“We try to be very aware that not everyone in the school district has the same values,” Powell said. “A parent who does not want their child to read the Bible should be informed that their child has checked out the Bible. A parent who does not want his child to read the Quran should be informed that his child has read the Quran.”
The list will be an evolving document, Powell said, as some books are added and others are removed.
Superintendent Dan Snowberger said the policy changes came from parents in the community wanting to know what materials their children have access to at school.
“We don’t ban books,” Snowberger said. ‘We’re not saying you can’t have these kinds of books. But we’re giving parents who don’t want their kids to get a book like this the opportunity to opt out…I think we’re trying to be very reasonable.”
During the meeting, Powell encouraged parents to get involved and fill out a form to have a book reviewed if they think it has questionable content. She asked parents to look at the books marked for removal because she wanted them to “be shocked too.”
“We do this to protect our children,” Powell said.
Colorado’s public libraries have seen an increasing number of requests to ban or restrict access to books, programs or exhibits, mirroring trends across the country as conservative movements target books and programs with LGBTQ and race-related themes .
Data from the American Library Association in 2023, it found that 142 titles were challenged in 12 separate attempts to restrict access to books in Colorado libraries. In 2022, the association reported that 56 titles were challenged in 17 different requests to Colorado libraries, a 240% increase from the five titles challenged in five attempts recorded in 2018.
In June, Governor Jared Polis signed a new law requiring the state’s public libraries to establish written policies for acquiring, preserving, displaying and using library resources — and for handling requests to remove books or other resources.
Public libraries must follow the standards specified in the bill, including that they cannot exclude books and other resources because of the ethnic background or gender identity of someone associated with the material.
School libraries are not considered public libraries, so the law does not apply.
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