Williamson County Schools votes to keep five challenged books

Members of the Williamson County Schools Board of Education voted 8 to 2 to keep five challenged books on the shelves Monday night.Those books include Speak, Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Field Guide to the North American Teenager, Where the Crawdads Sing, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. These books contain the common themes of either the main characters being outcasts based on their own personal experiences or overcoming trauma and earlier this year, a district committee recommended against removing them from Williamson County School libraries.“A book that, in my opinion, makes a teenager kind of dive into and recognize that everybody is different and people at based upon their own personal experiences is a valuable piece of literature that’s a whole lot deeper than just the subtext or the specific sexual content, or bullying content, or drug content that’s being called out here,” said board member Eliot Mitchell.The decision to keep the five books followed pushback from some board and community members who felt keeping them violates the state’s Age-Appropriate Act state law.“You guys are breaking the law. You’re breaking the Age-Appropriate Act, you’re breaking Materials, you are, by keeping certain books in libraries, you are providing pornographic materials to our children. Our taxpayer-funded public-school libraries should not contain explicit, violent, and pornographic material that offers no educational value. Removing a book from a school library or restricting access via mature reading list is not book banning,” said community member Trisha Lucente.Board member Donna Clements was one of the two “no” votes. She also expressed concern about state law.“My concern, and I think there’s been a lot of confusion going back and forth about book bans, what we are allowed to do what we aren’t allowed to do. We took an oath of office to follow state law. And we have a state law that we have not really paid attention to, and I’m concerned, we need to follow the state law,” said Clements.Despite those concerns, the books received support from parents and students who spoke out against efforts to remove them.“I completely understand the concerns of some of the parents in the room. I think comparing these materials to pornography is quite extreme, but every parent still has the right to say, ‘this is not appropriate for my child, I don’t want them to access it’. Please don’t give other parents the right to make those decisions for me and my family,” said community member and parent Jeff Stewart.Board member Jennifer Aprea was among the 8 voting to keep the books on the shelf.She told fellow board members that removing them would go against the district’s principles.“I feel very strongly that by putting restrictions on students and families’ rights to check out books from a library, especially our older students, our high school students, goes against what we should stand for as a district. And so, I just want to re-emphasize that we are trying to trust our professionals,” said Aprea.Williamson County Schools currently provides an option for parents to opt-in/opt-out of books their children can access in their school library.