Parents + Policy = Protecting Kids

My friends, it’s very likely you’re in the dark about how truly horrible and destructive many, many books are in your school’s libraries and classrooms. I say that because I too was in the dark until I saw these books with my own eyes. We also see it in your stunned and saddened faces when you open up some of these shockingly inappropriate books at America’s Women events (See one of our recent posts--Content warning.) 

Every parent, grandparent and citizen must know that young children are regularly consuming blatantly inappropriate content in schools, and your tax dollars are paying for it.  

We’re actively addressing this through our Library Task Force, which works to inform the public, support protective legislation, and collaborate with policymakers. 

Kelli Anderson of Queen Creek Unified School District is an AZ school board member who authored strong, proactive policies governing both school and classroom libraries. 

This is forward-thinking leadership, essential to safeguard children from premature sexualization and ideological content they’re not ready to process. Please read her blog below and recommend policy like hers to YOUR school district (whether you have children there, or not). Share this (and Action #3 below) with your networks. Join us to protect children by emailing: education@AmericasWomen.org. Lastly, use and share our Voter Guide for recommended school board candidates (coming soon). 

"You don't fully grasp the world's darkness until you're shielding your children from it." - Author Unknown 

Over the last several years, we have seen an ideological push to expose young children to materials and concepts that young minds do not hold the capacity to decipher, nor the maturity to comprehend. Parents send their children to school to learn math, reading and writing, science, history, and other educational topics. What they do not send their kids to school for, is exposure to inappropriate, graphic, and mature topics that educators have no place introducing. How have we let this happen in our schools, and even in our public libraries, at such an alarming rate? The answer is quite simple: complacency. 

A large faction of American parents were awakened to the pervasive problem of sexualized lessons and indoctrination occurring inside the classrooms. Many were shocked at the sorts of topics being taught to their young children that they would have otherwise remained unaware of, had the schools not shut down. This awakening started a new push to get these books and lessons out of our schools, but that mission highlighted another problem. Parents found that our local school boards and city councils had been overrun with ideologues who not only supported these sorts of materials and lessons, but approved of them and promoted them. 

In other districts, more conservative leaning boards became complacent and comfortable in their area. They failed to use their majority to govern in a proactive manner by installing stronger guardrails and protections against the possibility of these issues happening in their district. These are the most dangerous districts, because a false sense of security allowed the small minority of ideologues to find loopholes to bring otherwise unapproved books into the classrooms without any oversight. For the most part, unless children are checking those books out and bringing them home, parents would have no idea what books their children had access to inside the classroom. 

When I was first appointed to the school board to fill the seat for a member who had stepped down, I was immediately contacted by parents who had questions about the books and lessons their children had access to in the classroom. At first, my approach was what I like to call whack-a-mole, where I brought each instance to the attention of the district, and they removed the inappropriate books or material, addressed the lessons, and we would all move on. After a few months of seeing this occurrence over and over, sparse as it was, I decided that there needed to be a more permanent, and proactive solution. I combed through our district policies, trying to find the approval process for books and materials, and found that there was not a clearly defined oversight policy. 

Further, there was not a single policy that applied to classroom libraries. Thus, teachers were free to go to the store and purchase any book they deemed appropriate and put them directly into the hands of their students without ever having to have them approved or even reviewed. This was a major problem. It was also a problem for educators who do not use their positions to push an ideology, because they become stigmatized by being associated with those who do, exploiting the loophole to bring inappropriate books into the classroom. We still have incredible teachers out there, so a policy to put oversight on classroom libraries would serve to protect them from unearned scrutiny as well. 

I sat down and wrote an amendment to an existing policy that created an approval process for every single book or reading material that would be put into a classroom. Furthermore, each school is now required to keep a record of all reading materials in each classroom, and upload them to the platform that parents have access to so that parents can review the available reading materials and opt out of any they do not wish their children to be exposed to. This policy not only gave oversight of classroom libraries to the schools but gave parents oversight of their child’s classroom as well. 

Another point of this policy was expanded to our school libraries, requiring approval of all library materials by a delegate at the school prior to any of them being added to any of our school libraries. This policy also includes electronic materials, which in the age of technology, is absolutely necessary. 

We now live in a day and age where we have examples all over our nation showing different pathways of governance and the outcomes they produce. Unfortunately, for too long, conservatives have been reactive in their governance. They wait until the fight is sitting at their doorstep before mounting a response. If you’re fighting the battle on your doorstep when it comes to inappropriate materials and books in the classroom, you are too late. Children have already been exposed, and there is no way to help them unlearn certain things.  

We must govern with a proactive mindset. We need to look ahead beyond what we are reacting to in the moment, but read the landscape for the fights we will be having in two years or more. We must begin to install safety measures and guardrails that protect children before exposure, not once they’ve already been inundated with materials far beyond their cognitive abilities to understand and process what they’ve seen. 

If you are on a school board, or involved in your local school district, I encourage you to get these sorts of policies in your district too.  

I’d also like to add, whether or not you have children in your local school district, you will still be impacted by the success or failures of that district. The children educated in these schools will one day inherit this nation, and they will be the ones fighting for what’s right in our communities. Fight these battles now so that the next generation doesn’t have to. It’s your duty as a taxpaying American.