Okay, let me just say right out that banning books is just wrong.

There’s a particular incident of book banning that is drawing a lot of attention right now, and that’s the banning of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and Sarah Ockler’s Twenty Boy Summer from the schools of Republic, Missouri. One Wesley Scroggins challenged the books, as well as Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, saying that they taught principles contrary to the Bible.

School libraries really take a beating in the censorship wars. People are so bound and determined to protect their children from anything that might violate their innocence.  And, unlike public libraries, schools are in loco parentis, which means they are supposed to act  “in place of the parent”.  The simplest thing to do is to just take the book off the shelf when a parent complains, or when your principal is staring you down.  It doesn’t make you feel good about yourself, but putting yourself out there at the possible cost of losing your job is a scary thing to do. That sort of informal, er, agreement, happens a lot at the classroom or building level. It happens more when there’s no selection policy or challenge procedure in place. One of the things that gets drilled into you early in library school is to make sure you have a detailed selection policy and a formal challenge procedure in your policy manual. While a lot of parental objections are easily dealt with on the individual level (Oh, you don’t want your son reading Junie B. Jones? Let him know he isn’t supposed to check those books out- you can always return them), a selection policy spells out how and why you choose the materials you do, and a formal challenge procedure means that challenge will go up the line, as far as it needs to, and as publicly as possible.

So Wesley Scroggins challenged these three books, and instead of a principal hiding them in a closet, or a school board voting against them without even reading them, the school board did something I think is pretty neat. It’s not something they HAD to do. They developed and used a selection policy and went through a formal challenge process. Nothing about it was a secret. Just the way ALA wants it to be, although the results are obviously NOT the ones ALA, or almost any librarian, wants them to be, with Twenty Boy Summer and Slaughterhouse Five removed from the schools.  But because of that policy and all the discussion that took place, Speak, the third challenged book, has remained in the schools there.

Am I cheering for the school board’s decision to remove the books from the schools? Heck no. But the silver lining here is that because the school board took this so seriously, and because they had a selection policy and formal challenge procedure, it may be a lot simpler to appeal the decision, and, I hope, get it reversed. And nobody was fired, either.

In the meantime, if you’d like to make certain that the students of Republic, Missouri will have access to copies of Slaughterhouse Five, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library is giving copies to them for free. If you would like to contribute a donation to make that possible, click here. I don’t think Sarah Ockler, the author of Twenty Boy Summer, has a similar setup, but perhaps, if you’d like to see the students of Republic, Missouri have access to her book as well, you could send a copy, or a designated donation, to the
Republic Branch Library of the Springfield-Greene County Library System, as all the copies appear to be checked out, and there’s a list for holds.

You don’t have to wait for September and Banned Books Week. Now is a great time to read, and give, a banned book.