Idaho school boards can’t simply ban library books without following a process
.jpg "Rediscovered Books in Boise set up a display to include the books the Nampa school board voted to remove from the shelves of the district’s libraries.")
Nampa school board members must have recognized they could be in legal hot water when they decided last month, on a split vote, to remove 23 books from library shelves, including such great works of literature as “The Bluest Eye,” “The Kite Runner” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Board members Monday night revisited the issue and at least recognized that they can’t make the decision to ban books indiscriminately.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1982 in Board of Education v. Pico that a school board can’t remove books from its shelves simply because board members disagree with the content in a book. But it was a plurality decision and didn’t settle the question of whether removing books is a violation of the First Amendment. The court ruling still left open a school board’s discretion in removing books from shelves. The justices recognized that books that are “pervasively vulgar” or “lacking any educational suitability” could be removed.
“But those are pretty vague principles,” Joe Borton, a Meridian City Council member and a lawyer with experience in the matter and in drafting policies on the issue, said in a phone interview. “That’s why the process is so important.”
Nampa school board members didn’t follow their process when they banned the books last month. In fact, they preempted their own process.
Committees consisting of librarians, staff members and parents were in the middle of reviewing each one of the “challenged” books and were in the process of making recommendations to the board, but the committees weren’t able to finish their work before the board made its decision, according to a previous story in the Idaho Statesman.
“A lot of time and work went into reading these books, analyzing it, seeing if it’s appropriate,” Skyview High librarian Ann Christensen told board members Monday. “We felt like we wasted time.”
A couple of board members said they wanted a clearer process.
It sounds more like they want a different process that will produce an outcome they want: to ban a book simply because it may contain some content they don’t like.
But it doesn’t work that way.
“The guiding legal principle is that a local school board may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal ‘to prescribe what shall be accepted in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion,’” according to Borton, quoting from the Pico ruling.
Borton said there’s not a clear bright line defined in courts as to when something can be removed from shelves and when it veers into government censorship.
The school board members in the Pico case characterized their banned books, including works by Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Wright, as “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Sem[i]tic, and just plain filthy.”
An objective evaluation process will counteract that kind of arbitrary standard.
“What’s so important is to establish a process that is objectively fair, so you’re not making up rules in the middle of a controversy,” Borton said. “The idea is to have the rules of the road, how we’re going to address these concerns consistently, regardless of who’s making the complaint, or regardless of what the issue is.”
By cutting off that process and closing debate last month, Nampa school board members were making up rules in the middle of a controversy over banning these 23 books.
As Christensen pointed out at Monday night’s Nampa school board meeting, “I don’t know what your parameters are. I don’t want to … (purchase) books that are going to be taken away.”
Christensen said she’s hesitant to buy books for fear that board members could later ban them, so clearly the board’s action is already having a chilling effect.
“You could go through the whole process, and you might end up with the same result,” Borton said. “But you might not. But if you want to have some integrity to the decision-making process, you can’t skip steps. And if anybody’s certain of a particular result, then allow the process to run its course. Have an open mind. That’s your obligation.”
In this case, it’s clear the three Nampa school board members who voted to ban the books didn’t fulfill their obligation.
This story was originally published June 8, 2022 at 4:00 AM.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this column misidentified the school where Ann Christensen is a librarian. She is at Skyview High School.
