Opinion: With the rise of book bans targeting BIPOC and LGBTQ+ authors, it’s important to demand transparency within school district’s decision-making process on removal of content
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On April 10, Oregon’s Canby School District met to discuss the removal of 36 titles that were deemed “promiscuous” and “explicit” by two concerned parents. Outside, there were protests led by students calling for reconsideration of the 36 books and calling for people to “read banned books.”
Zachery Woodruff, a 2023 graduate of Canby High School and a current University of Oregon freshman, has been very vocal about the lack of transparency within this process. During his initial testimony on the topic, he mentioned how the school district purposefully abused the wording in the Canby Procedure for Reconsideration Use of Resource Instruction Material (Section Three) for their own benefit to remove controversial titles instead of following proper protocol.
“Books are supposed to stay on the shelves throughout the review process, and they’re not supposed to be removed, but they claimed that they could do it for ‘the good of the school district,’ which makes zero sense. We got no news, they were just taken off,” Woodruff said.
As per Canby District requirements, the district formed a committee to reconsider the titles for officially removing the books from shelves –– this meeting ended with the official removal of “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov, restricted five titles and placed warning labels on five of the books listed. This decision was followed by a statement released by the district, which lacked specificity of the decision-making process.
This lack of specificity and transparency between students and the school board can lead to federal and state constitutional violations, especially when done behind closed doors. Due to the lack of public acknowledgment of titles, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Oregon and Parents Defending Schools and Libraries (PDSAL) filed a joint public record request formally seeking information about the reconsideration process and potential appeals from the community.
In the formal public record request, the ACLU of Oregon and PDSAL cite that “The ACLU of Oregon and PDSAL believe the district is obligated to notify the public about its decisions and provide an opportunity for interested members to be heard regarding those decisions. These fundamental principles of due process are critical when our government officials are making decisions that impact our fundamental freedoms like the freedom to access information and engage in expressive activities.”
The Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Oregon Library Association (IFC) echoes similar concerns that Woodruff mentioned: there was a strategic breach of contract in order to remove books before the proper process of consideration was committed.
The process in which books are silently removed from the shelves is unacceptable. Students and community members deserve to have the right to react to the concerns of opposing members, but at the end of the day, students should have the right to decide on what books they want to read. By dissolving any formal process before the removal of books effectively blocks channels of communication for appeals of the ban and takes away due process from the system.
In an interview with the ACLU, PDSAL founder Darin Stewart said “It is imperative that decisions about expressive content in school libraries in particular be done transparently to ensure that the interests of the entire student and parent communities are represented and that the demands of the loudest few do not trample the constitutional rights of others.”
In a study conducted by the Washington Post, they found that 60% of all book ban challenges across the United States in 2021-2022 were initiated by 11 people. The concerns of such few essentially banned the right to thousands of stories and restricted the intellectual freedoms of even more students.
“Public school libraries are central to a student’s First Amendment right to access ideas and information,” ACLU-OR Legal Director Kelly Simon said. “Restricting books is restricting student freedom.”
Students have the right to know and intervene in book bans, and school districts need to be transparent about how and when they are removing books from the shelves. Without a chance to intervene and democratically voice their concerns, school boards fail to serve their students with their most fundamental rights to knowledge.