STOLEN STORIES

Iowa’s new bill 496 might change Iowa’s schools drastically and influence how students use school libraries.

On May 26th the state of Iowa had the House successfully pass a new law that could change West’s library in a major way. Iowa recently introduced a new law formally known as bill 496. Now that this bill is law it will radically change schools in every grade. The law contains sections governing students requesting accommodations for their gender and younger children receiving instruction regarding sexual orientation or STDS. Although the law contains large sections about several different topics some of the most controversial sections cover school libraries and curriculums.

The law states that school libraries may not contain books with “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act”.

These same rules would also apply to classroom materials that teachers can teach. While this decision may seem ambiguous, if interpreted correctly it could apply to many different texts that appear in our school’s library. Recently, the law was passed by Kim Reynolds on May 26th after a long period of being stuck as a bill. This occurred after the law was passed by the Senate and House of Representatives on April 19th and 20th respectively. Now that it’s signed the law will go to the Department of Education for exact instructions on how to enforce the law. How the Department of Education chooses to enforce the law through policy will likely change a large amount of what the law means for teachers and school staff. These instructions will finally be sent to schools and enforced by staff. This lack of exact details makes it difficult for schools to prepare for the upcoming changes.

Librarian Jill Hofmockel believes that one of the main issues with interpreting and preparing for the law is finding out how the Department of Education will interpret the law.

“The legislation has generated so many questions . . . that just aren’t addressed in the legislation,” Hofmockel said. “One of the things that we are waiting on is guidance from the state on what the day-to-day actual ramifications of the bill will be”.

This can create frustration with school staff who are heavily impacted by the law. They may not know what exactly they will have to take off their shelves or what the law deems too sexual for students to consume. Additionally, the law may make the staff decide what is banned if they cannot come to a common consensus over what books are allowed. This may mean teachers would have to check almost every book in their libraries. English teacher Ann Rocarek worries over what this new law may mean for both the school library and how books could be checked.

“No, I think [making a list of books to remove] will be put on us,” Rocarek said.

The act of having to check every book in the library for sexually explicit content could cripple the number of books that are allowed or added to the library. This is a serious problem in part because only a few books having to be removed could cause some legal trouble for the librarians at a school. Although this law may not change a large amount for classrooms it could seriously affect libraries.

“It doesn’t look like there’s a lot of texts that I have my students currently read that would be in danger of violating the law,” Rocarek said. “I think more than anything it will affect the content in the library,”. The law mostly requires teachers to check their content, so lower grade English classes will not be affected much. It may affect what content students are allowed to bring in to read or restrict some stories, but most content like that already has alternative assignments that students can request. This is one of the systems that teachers have for students or students’ parents who don’t want their kids consuming specific content. Most assignments have alternative readings available.

“The irony, I think, is that one of the bills that is also being passed requires teachers to put all of their curriculum online, which I actually have no problem with,” Rocarek said. “If every story I read, every activity we do, has to be posted at the beginning of the trimester, beginning of the year so your families … can make the choice ‘Hey, I don’t want [my student] reading Romeo and Juliet’”

Existing processes also occur in the school libraries that this law mainly governs. The current district has a policy for dealing with books that students or parents think shouldn’t be in libraries. A member of the school district community can raise a book to the attention of the dis -

Impact On Teachers

trict. If they choose to continue their claim the district will create a reconsideration committee that has a set makeup. The committee contains librarians, teachers, staff, members of the community, and students. Committees like this show how a large part of the law creates requirements for items our school already carries.

“I am not closed to the idea that while I try to choose very carefully what goes in our library that there wouldn’t be books that are not appropriate or books that would be of concern,” Hofmockel said.

The concept of recording what happens in a school library is a large theme in parts of the law and items like having a list of all books available or having an option for members of the local community to report books they don’t think belong are already available at our library. A large amount of the law’s specifications are already met at our and many other high school libraries. Despite this fact, some of the stipulations might not change parts of our current system, critics point out how the law may change how difficult it is to remove a book from school shelves.

“I also think that sweeping legislation like this, that avoids differences in local communities is problematic,” Hofmockel said. “I think it’s difficult to generalize what is appropriate for a library collection in all of the various different contexts of communities we have in our state,”

The law creates a large field of age-appropriate content which both standardizes what is considered age-appropriate and excludes some writings that aren’t universally agreed as unacceptable. This is a large change from the past system where teachers or librarians would get to choose what content they allowed in their libraries. The bans can also feel like an insult to librarians who already have collections that they feel are acceptable.

This is also frustrating for teachers of higher-level classes that may already have a set curriculum. English teacher Tom Lindsey has past experiences with laws relating to books in his classroom.

“I think it’s ambiguous enough that they can argue [aganst books] and then my sense is that the district is not gonna push back,” Lindsey said. “Now next year English teachers are gonna be walking even more on eggshells,”

Kirkwood or AP classes may struggle to teach complex subjects when any book they bring in may be challenged. This could immediately put large amounts of the curriculum on hold. This would be especially harmful considering the set curriculums these classes demand. The law changes how content is challenged which may lead to some classes struggling to adapt.

“Well I think everything could be challenged, that’s the problem cause a lot of books have been challenged in the past, but most of the time its whatever,” Lind sey said.

This represents a large change to the existing system where teachers may have to remove any book a student or parent requests for an unspecified amount of time. This is is annoying for teachers who want a set curriculum for their classes. Additionally, it can change how teachers approach their classes. While normally teachers want to expose their students to many broad ideas, this puts a limit on what they can teach.

“The whole goal when you teach, no matter what you teach, is cause you want to give kids the chance to broaden their horizons and learn,” Rocarek said. “I think it’s different because there is a difference between requiring a text from a class and having a text available for someone to check out at their own free will,”