Knox County Schools is changing how it selects and reviews materials in its school libraries, responding partly to concerns raised by conservative Christian activists.

Students, teachers and parents turned out to show support for school libraries.

Sarah Searles, the district’s academic resources supervisor for library media services, told the school board last night that starting next year, each school will have a School Library Council that will include a parent representative.

And three committees made up of school librarians from across the district will conduct proactive reviews of “sensitive titles” — books that have been widely challenged in other districts or states, or that particular concerns have been raised about.

“We're aware that certain titles are considered especially sensitive, especially in the areas of drugs, sex, violence, language,” Searles told the board during a presentation at its monthly meeting. “These are things that are known in the (library) field. And those titles require complex decision-making in a library collection.”

The new committees are in addition to the district’s existing policies on library materials, which include a process by which a parent, student or staff member can challenge books they think are inappropriate.

Searles’ presentation and announcement came after several months of pressure from the local chapter of Moms for Liberty, the national conservative activist group that has sought to remove or restrict books from school libraries in states across the country.

The Knox County chapter of Moms for Liberty, headed by local conservative activist Sheri Super, has a page on its website of books in Knox County school libraries that it says are inappropriate even for high school students because of sexual or other mature content. The page links to reviews of the books on two national conservative websites, BookLooks and Take Back the Classroom.

The objected-to books include such well-known titles as The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. Also on the list are several personal memoirs by LGBTQ authors, including Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson.

The board considered making changes to its book challenge process last year, after Moms for Liberty first raised concerns, but decided to leave it as it was. It is unclear if the new committees will satisfy the group’s stated aim to remove or age-restrict materials it objects to, since at the outset all they promise is two new avenues for review.

School board Vice Chair Steve Triplett, who has been Moms for Liberty’s biggest ally on the board, expressed some frustration that the additional procedures could still leave books in schools that he finds offensive.

“If we're just going to review them by the same standards we always have, I guess the question is, why go through the process of reviewing them?” Triplett asked. “It’s already there, they’ve been in theory held up to this standard. So I guess, what’s different?”

On the other hand, board member Daniel Watson said he appreciated the effort to expand the review process. He said it would be impossible to apply a single person or group’s moral framework to the diversity of a system with nearly 90 schools and 59,000 students.

“I certainly don't want to be the person who gets to make that ultimate decision, or any one group of people,” Watson said. “I don’t think as a board member that’s really my role.”

The New Committees

Searles said that the district’s library staff — who work with students every day and have master’s degrees with specialties in library science — will still take the lead at both the local and district levels. But they will have collaborators.

Each school will have a Library Council made up of five to seven people including the school librarian, the principal, a classroom teacher, a counselor, and a parent or guardian of a student at the school. The councils will make recommendations and selections for both adding and removing books from the library. (Books are removed regularly, often because they are damaged, old or no longer widely read.)

“What this group will be engaged in is really thinking about those processes in that collection development management cycle,” Searles said. “Identifying library needs, collaborating on what those new titles should be as they're added, collaborating on what that removal looks like as they get to the evaluation stage.”

She said that by bringing in other school voices, the council will take some pressure off librarians (who have been targets of political rhetoric in recent years, including in Tennessee). 

At the district level, there will be three new Sensitive Title Review Committees, one each for elementary, middle and high schools. They will be made up of five librarians each. Searles said librarians at each level would rotate through serving on the committees.

The committees are charged with giving close evaluation to titles that are in some KCS libraries but that are known to have raised objections or concerns locally or elsewhere. Searles said the first three “sensitive titles” for review have been selected — at the high school level, Gender Queer; at middle school, Hey, Kiddo by Jarrett J. Krosoczka; and at elementary school, A Tale Dark and Grimm by Adam Gidwitz. 

All have been challenged or banned in some places, with Gender Queer — a deeply personal memoir of Kobabe’s struggle with a sense of gender growing up — a particular target of conservative groups nationwide. (Kobabe told The New York Times last year, “When you remove those books from the shelf or you challenge them publicly in a community, what you’re saying to any young person who identified with that narrative is, ‘We don’t want your story here.’”)

After those evaluations, the committees will decide whether to recommend keeping the books or not. Those recommendations will then go to the local school councils, which can decide to follow them or send the title through the school’s regular challenge review process.

“​​Our challenge to these review committees is to provide an unbiased evaluation to the School Library Councils so that each of them can make a strong decision about keeping or removing the books,” Searles said. “Our goal is to grow capacity in the district for supporting complex decisions so that we can take care of everyone involved.”

Carly Harrington, the district’s chief of communications, said after the presentation that some details are still being worked out, including how members will be named to the local school councils. The councils will start with the 2024-25 school year. 

Voices Against Removal

The “proactive” review of contentious materials — even absent a direct parent complaint — is something Moms for Liberty has lobbied for since last year. But as Triplett’s reaction suggested, the reviews are unlikely to satisfy religious conservative objections unless they lead to actual book removals.

During public forum on the topic at Thursday’s meeting, Super and a handful of other members and supporters of Moms for Liberty urged the board to move quickly to remove what they deemed objectionable materials.

Super spent most of her three-minute speaking time attacking the academic discipline of queer theory, which she labeled “Marxist” and said had “infiltrated” the entire K-12 curriculum — including library shelves. 

“These books intentionally sexualize and destabilize children,” Super said. “They don’t help children to be seen or educated. It endangers children, and it is not by accident — it is by design.”

She added, “Don’t allow activist demands to cloud your judgment.”

But Super and her allies were outnumbered both on the speakers’ list and in the crowded room by students, teachers and parents who exhorted the board to leave libraries in the hands of librarians.

A group of students from West High School’s Library Ambassadors program told board members that far from being threatening, libraries are safe places for students to explore and find perspectives that mirror their own experiences or learn from those that are different.

“It's vital for students to feel represented in literature, and it is equally important for them to understand viewpoints and ways of life that go beyond their experience,” said West student Sadie Barongan.

She also took issue with the way conservative groups have labeled some books sexually explicit on the basis of a few paragraphs or a few panels from a graphic novel. 

“The sections of the text that are labeled as sexually explicit are not intended to encourage promiscuity,” she said. “Rather, they're included by the author to honestly depict significant moments in their life. These scenes do include sexual experiences, but their context is one of trauma, growth and recovery.”

Her schoolmate Amelia Bumpus made a similar point in a different way — by reading the board a graphic passage from the Bible’s Book of Judges, which depicts the gang-rape and dismemberment of Levite’s concubine. “The comfort and guidance some find in the Bible as a whole outweigh certain disturbing verses,” Bumpus said. “This is an example of the importance of context. It’s the same with some of the books you have seen excerpts from.”

Teacher and parent Stacey Reece told the board, “If I don't want my son to read a book, he won't read it, it’s that simple. I will never deny access to books to other people's children, because that's an overstep of my role as a parent. I am responsible for parenting my child, not all of Knox County’s children.”

And Susan Groenke, a professor of English education in the University of Tennessee’s College of Education, said that research shows that reading books that deal with difficult or sensitive topics is beneficial for a student’s education and development.

“They help them develop positive relationships with their peers, with their teachers and with their parents, especially when their parents are reading these books and talking about these books with their teens,” Groenke said. “‘Sensitive titles’ also help adolescents learn to empathize with others and take on others’ perspectives, thus helping to develop moral judgment.”

Several board members said they thought having the school councils would help bring more perspectives into building library collections that serve their communities. Watson said ongoing discussion about how a library can best serve its students was valuable, because needs and interests and societal norms all shift. He noted that there were probably books on the shelves 40 years ago that would be considered offensive now for different sets of reasons.

But Triplett, a graduate of the Christian fundamentalist Crown College in Powell, made an appeal to a higher power. 

“I do understand that culture does change over time,” he said. “But I just simply want to say that absolute truth does not. There is absolute truth. And we will live by that, we are far better off for it.”

That prompted a response from the board’s only pastor and one of its two Democrats, Rev. John Butler. He told Triplett that there can be differences of opinion on moral matters even among members of his own congregation. 

“We have this situation, this discussion, we can talk about it every board meeting, it is not going to resolve it,” Butler said. “We have a process, we have a policy, let’s utilize it. And as we utilize it, let’s get better at utilizing it. Because I, for one, do not want to spend another hour talking about this.”