Decisions have been made about 25 of the 58 books that Superintendent Cynthia McCabe ordered removed from Carroll County public schools’ library shelves last September amid challenges from the Carroll County chapter of Moms for Liberty.
As of this week, nine books have been permanently removed from shelves, nine have been retained and will once again be available to students, and six titles will now require parental permission for a student to check out.
One book, “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, will be retained in high schools but removed from middle school shelves.
Removed books include: “Doing It,” by Hannah Wilton; “Red Hood,” by Elana Arnold; “November 9: A Novel,” and “It Ends With Us,” by Colleen Hoover; and “A Court of Mist and Fury,” and “A Court of Wings and Ruin,” by Sarah J. Maas, all of which were banned in the most recent rounds of decisions.
“Man O’ War,” by Cory McCarthy; “Nineteen Minutes,” by Jodi Picoult; “People Kill People,” by Ellen Hopkins; and “Blankets,” by Craig Thompson were retained in the most recent rounds of decisions.
The Carroll County Public Schools Reconsideration Committee’s decision to ban “A Court of Wings and Ruin,” “Red Hood” and “It Ends With Us” was made after the Board of Education unanimously voted Jan. 10 to update Policy IIAA, banning all library books and instructional materials that include “sexually explicit” content from public schools. The updated policy defines sexually explicit content as “unambiguously describing, depicting, showing, or writing about sex or sex acts in a detailed or graphic manner.”
The book reconsideration process remains otherwise the same, Assistant Superintendent of Instruction Nicholas Shockney said on Jan. 10.
The decision to retain “Shine,” by Lauren Myracle, made in the third round of decisions, was appealed to the superintendent. It was decided that the book will remain on shelves but will now require parental permission to borrow.
Requests to remove “Milk and Honey,” by Rupi Kaur; “Deal With It,” by Esther Drill; and “A Court of Silver Flames,” by Sarah J. Maas, received on June 7, were not addressed by the Reconsideration Committee as these titles were already discontinued from school system bookshelves, according to Director of Curriculum and Instruction Steve Wernick.
“Deal With It” has not circulated in media centers for several years, according to Wernick, and will not be purchased moving forward.
“Milk and Honey” and “A Court of Silver Flames” were removed using the system’s annual deselection process and will not be purchased by any library in the future, Wernick said. Materials are deselected by each school’s library/media specialist based on a number of factors, including poor physical condition, reading/comprehension level appropriateness, low circulation, lack of curricular relevance, problematic language and inaccurate content, according to Wernick.
“Deselecting is an integral and important part of collection development in school libraries,” Wernick said in an email. “It is essential that libraries evaluate the quality and content of all materials and delete worn, unsuitable, dated, or unnecessary materials. Continued attention to the quality of the collection and related maintenance of the collection helps to ensure a highly effective and quality collection.”
Including the challenged titles that were removed as part of the deselection process, a total of 61 Carroll County Public Schools library books have been challenged since last summer, according to Wernick.
Kit Hart, chair of Carroll County Moms for Liberty, said all book removal requests came from members of her group, due to each challenged book containing, “graphic sex or rape.” Moms for Liberty is a conservative group that advocates for parental rights in schools.
Since the requests were made, some parents and librarians opposed to the removals have shown up at school board meetings opposing them.
Donna Mignardi, president of the Maryland Association of School Librarians, said the group is working to stem book bans in Carroll County, which she said amounts to censorship.
“Book challenges and attempts at censorship have become more frequent in the past two years. These challenges are not isolated to Carroll County,” Mignardi said in September.
The school system’s Reconsideration Committee is tasked with making book removal decisions. It includes nonvoting chair Bruce Lesh, supervisor of elementary education for Carroll County Public Schools, as well as two school media specialists, two school-based administrators, one teacher and three parents. Three high school students are also included when the committee reviews books previously deemed appropriate for high schoolers. All members are appointed by the superintendent.
The committee meets every three to five weeks, public schools communications coordinator Brenda Bowers said, and it is not known how long it will take for the current list of book removal requests to be reviewed. In the past, about two books per year were directed to the Reconsideration Committee for review.
Books banned or retained by the reconsideration process may not be re-evaluated for school use for three years after the initial request for reconsideration, according to Carroll County Public Schools policy. Any decision to remove a book is final, but a decision to retain a book may be appealed to the superintendent within 10 days of receiving a decision. The appeal window has passed for each retained book.
Shockney acted as McCabe’s designee when reviewing books that were appealed to the superintendent. Shockney said he read each book for which the committee’s decision was appealed and rendered his decisions in accordance with school system’s Policy IIAA, which governs the selection, evaluation and adoption of instructional materials, including supplemental instructional materials like library books.
