Protecting Children, or Book Censorship?

The Nampa School Board banned 22 books. Critics are fighting to restore them.

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson is on the list of 22 books banned by the Nampa School Board.

Amid a national wave of concern over books available to schoolchildren addressing sex, race, and class, the Nampa School Board voted on May 9 to permanently relegate 22 books from schools to a Nampa School District storage facility. Three of them were listed on the optional recommended reading list for the district’s AP English classes: Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

What followed was a showdown between three parties laying claim to the interests of children. These were parents worried that schools were exposing students to smut and hazardous ideas, a school board ready to accept that interpretation of literature and take action, and critics who viewed all of this as a winnowing of childrens’ minds and an abridgment of their First Amendment rights.

If it was anyone’s aim to prevent students from getting their hands on the challenged texts, they failed. A grassroots resistance sprang into action. Independent, Boise-based Rediscovered Books began raising money and buying copies of the disputed titles, distributing more than 1,400 of them at protests coordinated by a new group, the Nampa Banned Books Fan Club. Together they’ve made more copies privately accessible, but have also waged a so-far unsuccessful campaign for the school board to reverse its decision on the grounds that rather than protecting children, censorship takes the prerogative away from parents.

“Parents don’t have the right to control what other people have access to for their children,” says the fan club’s leader, College of Idaho Associate Professor, eServices Librarian, and Educational Technology Coordinator Lance McGrath. “Talk to your kids about what they’re reading, what your family values are. Provide that guidance and direction, but don’t take that right away from another parent and their student.”

The controversy caught a troubled school district in a national crossfire. Both around the country and in Idaho, growing numbers of parents have expressed concern that libraries and teachers are exposing their children to inappropriate materials, from sexualizing content, concepts like gender and Critical Race Theory (CRT), and values not taught at home. Earlier this year, the Idaho Senate passed a resolution condemning “divisive” curricula that strays from portraying the United States as “a pillar of freedom in the world,” and the Idaho House of Representatives passed a bill that would have punished librarians for passing “harmful” material to children.

In Nampa, high turnover at the uppermost levels of the district driven by dissatisfaction with the board has resulted in the resignation of a longtime superintendent and a new makeup of the board, one vocal in its opposition to so-called leftist topics allegedly being taught in schools.

For the majority of trustees, there was urgency behind the May 9 vote. For Trustee Marco Valle and President Jeff Kirkman, removing the books would curtail their then ongoing review by teachers and parents, but buy time for the board to craft a clear policy for addressing book challenges. Trustee Tracey Pearson said that leaving the books on the shelves could cause “lifetime trauma to a child that does not need to be maybe experimenting [with] something they’ve read.” Though the initial question was whether to remove the books until they could be reconsidered through the lens of the new policy, the vote that ultimately took place expelled them permanently. Trustees Brook Taylor and Mandy Simpson cast dissenting votes.

Board President Kirkman says that he hopes to have a new, “transparent and established” review process in place by the time students return to classrooms this fall, and that there is momentum behind revisiting the challenged books when that happens. But the board has already acted censoriously. According to the American Library Association, “Libraries should not limit the selection and development of library resources simply because minors will have access to them,” and resistance to the public board’s decision to stand between art and its audience is fierce. Kirkman balked at the charge, saying that the board has actually increased student interest in the banned titles.

“The criticism that this is akin to censorship, well, I don’t think so,” Kirkman, who made the original motion to remove the challenged books, says. “If anything, we’ve done more to incentivize kids to go out and read these books. … [Students] can get them at the public library. They get them at bookstores. They’ve been given out for free.”

That isn’t enough for the people handing out the books. They have argued that public schools are ideal spaces to cultivate young people’s critical and imaginative horizons. Stripping them of literature under the guise that it’s pornographic caps that process, but schools also have a mandate to protect children from pornography. During the abandoned review process in Nampa, committee members used Common Sense Media, which evaluates books for problematic content. It rated one of the banned books, John Green’s Michael L. Printz Award-winning “Looking for Alaska,” as having violent and sexual themes, but also strong educational value — suitable for readers ages 14 and older. The American Library Association listed “Looking for Alaska” as the fourth most-challenged book in America between 2010 and 2019, and in 2016 the Nampa-adjacent West Ada School District banned it from its middle schools.

That intersection of difficult content and literary strength is what drew Rediscovered Books to make “Looking for Alaska” a staff pick at Rediscovered Books on its release. Co-owner Laura DeLaney described it as “a great book, just straight-up,” but also “a tough book about who we are and how we fit into the world.” That’s why she said restoring banned books to Nampa school library shelves is paramount to her and free speech activists. Reading texts like “Looking for Alaska” builds empathy, judgment, and thinking skills, and they are the location of an important element of public education.

“Public schools are one of the greatest gifts we have in our country, because this is the place where all students have access to education,” she says. “I do not believe in limiting the books that students can choose to read. That serves no one; it only serves to silence voices.”