Knox County school board fails to pass policy change banning books depicting sexual imagery
A proposal to ban books depicting sexual imagery failed by a 4-2 vote at Thursday’s Knox County Board of Education meeting.
Board members Steven Triplett, Susan Horn, Travis Wright, and Kristi Kristy voted in favor of the proposal, while Katherine Bike and Jennifer Owen opposed it. Board members Daniel Watson and John Butler abstained, ensuring the proposal did not receive the necessary majority. Betsy Henderson, another board member, was absent from the meeting.
The vote followed a work session meeting on Tuesday, where board member Horn suggested the district update its policies to address materials containing images of sexual activity, ensuring the school system complies with a new state law set to take effect on July 1.
“To me, this is something we ought to do, in my view, so I feel like we should do it now. We have to do it in July anyway,” Horn said.
The proposed change would have added language to the district’s policies regarding inappropriate material in school libraries, a topic that has been heavily debated at recent Knox County school board meetings. Triplett supported Horn’s proactive stance, urging his colleagues to vote yes, believing it to be the “right thing to do” regardless of the state law.
“We’ve tried since October, for a long time, to have this discussion to develop some sort of standard by which folks can review books, and we have not got anywhere with it,” Triplett said. “But this [proposal] is very clear, very plain, very simple, and very well-defined.”
This topic has been revisited multiple times in recent months, as right-wing advocacy groups like Moms for Liberty continue working both locally and nationally to ban books they deem age-inappropriate, often targeting books on racial inclusivity and LGBTQ topics. The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled Moms for Liberty as an extremist group.
In April, the district began forming school library councils and title review committees to evaluate and potentially ban books such as Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, which explores the author’s journey with gender identity and sexuality.
During the public comments session, several community members weighed in on the proposal amid the broader national debate surrounding book bans in public school libraries.
Knox County Schools English teacher Stacey Reece, speaking against the proposal, remarked that in her nearly 30 years of experience, she had never known an educator to promote sexual activity to students or fail in their duty to keep inappropriate materials from students.
“To me, saying a sex scene in a book ‘promotes sex,’ is akin to saying To Kill a Mockingbird promotes racism,” she said, emphasizing that educators and librarians are already trained and motivated to review and remove inappropriate materials.
Meanwhile, several attendees, donning Moms for Liberty shirts, voiced their support for Horn’s proposal. Sheri Super, the chair of Knox County Moms for Liberty, introduced herself as the leader of the “dreaded” organization and urged the board to act on Horn’s proposal.
“Sumner, Rutherford, Williamson, and Wilson County school boards have all removed inappropriate materials, while Knox County fiddles,” Super said.
