Could This Be the Future of MCS Libraries?
If books like Flamer are the baseline for books deemed inappropriate for the library, it could be.
What does life look like for librarians working in states with the most zealous book banners? The Washington Post spent time with a Florida librarian during her last week in an Osceola County high school to find out. In their profile, The Librarian Who Couldn’t Take It Anymore, they followed Tania Galiñanes from Monday to Friday of her last week as she wrapped up her 10 year career fed up with the politicization of the books on her shelves.
Tania had planned to spend the rest of her career in the Osceola County School District. She was 51. She could have stayed for years at Tohopekaliga, a school she loved that had only just opened in 2018. The library was clean and new. The shelves were organized. The chairs had wheels that moved soundlessly across the carpet. The floor plan was open, designed by architects who had promised “the 21st century media center.”
That was before the school board meeting on April 5, 2022, when Tania watched parents read aloud from books they described as a danger to kids. It was before she received a phone call from the district, the day after that, instructing her to remove four books from her shelves. It was before a member of the conservative group Moms for Liberty told her on Facebook, a few days later, that she shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near students. It had been 18 months since then. Nine months since she had taken Florida’s new training for librarians, a mandatory hour-long video, and heard the state say that books in the library must not contain sexual content that could be “harmful to minors” and that violating this statute would result in a third-degree felony. “A crime,” the training had said. “Districts should err on the side of caution.” It had been seven months since she began collecting Florida’s laws and statutes in a purple folder on her desk, highlighting the sections that made her mad, and also the ones that could get her fired. Six months since she broke out in hives, since eczema crept up the side of her face, since she started having trouble sleeping and got a prescription for an anti-anxiety medication. Five months since she stood in her house crying and her husband said it wasn’t worth it anymore. He could work two jobs if he had to. “You need to quit,” he’d told her. Six weeks since the start of another school year. Five weeks since she had given her notice.
And sometime in the middle of all that, as she showed up every weekday at 7 a.m. and tried to focus on the job she had signed up for, which was, she thought, to help students discover a book to love, Tania could feel something shifting inside her 21st-century media center. The relationships between students and books, and parents and libraries, and teachers and the books they taught, and librarians and the job they did — all of it was changing in a place she thought had been designed to stay the same.
A library was a room with shelves and books. A library was a place to read.
Now the library, or at least this library, was a place where a librarian was about to leave. Tania took the first book out of the box. It had been sent over by a teacher who, like teachers throughout the school, was concerned that the books inside her classroom might be in violation of the law. She looked at the title: “Music for Sight Singing.” She took out another. “30 Songs for Voice and Piano.” She took out another. “Star Wars: A Musical Journey, Easy Piano.”
There was no sexual content to review here. Barely any content at all. She was looking at sheet music.
It should have been absurd, kneeling over a box of music she couldn’t read, sent over by a music teacher who wasn’t sure what she was allowed to have in her classroom. But now the library was a place where things like this happened.
Regular parents in Florida and the school systems their kids attend appear to have been caught by surprise. According to PEN America, forty percent of the books that were banned in the United States during the last school year were banned in Florida. Outside groups like Moms for Liberty did a full court press on school boards across the state demanding that books they didn’t like be removed from public school libraries. Armed with emotionally charged words like “pornography,” “obscene,” and “sexually explicit,” their attempts to re-classify appropriate titles with mature themes as “harmful to minors” have largely been successful. These groups declared war on local school systems and began harassing librarians. Simply tending books on shelves became a crime. Wouldn’t Orwell find that interesting? Assuming his book, 1984, wasn’t one of the ones removed from the stacks, that is. In Florida, it appears, librarians are quite capable of crimethink and can now be prosecuted for thoughtcrimes. Moms for Liberty, the Thinkpol (thought police), conduct their self-righteous crusade on behalf of the Ministry of Truth with gusto. How very Orwellian.
When she had decided to become a librarian almost 10 years ago, it was for a simple reason: She loved to read. Now she watched as the work she did at a high school in Central Florida became part of a national debate. There were fights going on over democracy and fascism. There were parents and school board members arguing on social media and in meetings. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) wasn’t just passing laws but using them to run for president. To Tania, the pure act of reading was becoming more and more political, and as a result, she had to spend much of her time reviewing the books on her shelves — not to suggest one to a student but to ask herself whether the content was too mature for the teenagers at her school. Then she had moved on to the books in each teacher’s classroom, because as of this year, the state considered those books to be part of the library, too.
All of this took time. The librarian’s job was expanding even as she felt it was shrinking to a series of rote tasks: She would copy a book’s ISBN number into a peer-review database. She would decide whether to mark it with the thumb-size red sticker, provided to her by the district, that read “M” for “mature.” If a book wasn’t listed in a database, she would review it by hand, and then she would start again with the next book. In those hours, the job became a series of keystrokes, and she began to feel more like a censor than a librarian.
It wasn’t just Tania doing this. It was more than 1,400 librarians in all of Florida’s 67 counties, each district interpreting the law in its own way. In the panhandle, Escambia County had instructed its schools to close parts of their libraries entirely until every book on every shelf had been reviewed for sexual content. In Charlotte County, near Fort Myers, schools were told to remove any books with LGBTQ characters from elementary and middle school libraries.
Tania saw the headlines in other states, too: A new law in Iowa to prohibit library materials that include “depictions of a sex act.” A new plan in Houston to convert parts of some public school libraries into discipline centers for misbehaving students. Meanwhile, in Tania’s county, the public library had just eliminated late fees, as a means of attracting more readers. That was the whole idea, Tania had thought. But in schools, the whole idea was getting lost somewhere. Or at least that’s what she wanted to convey in January, when she wrote an email to the Florida Department of Education. She had just taken its mandatory library training. “Have we forgotten that students should be reading for pleasure?” she wrote.
In the end, under a book banning regime, librarians, who want nothing more than to help students learn to love reading, become the very censors they abhor. Librarians are trained to provide age-appropriate and reading level-appropriate books for the students in their schools. School boards that ban books are telling the librarians in their districts they don’t trust their professional judgment.
Tania, a married mother with two daughters, took her job of stocking her library with age-appropriate books for all students very seriously.
Her kids were in middle school, reading “Twilight,” and Tania asked them to hold off on the last book in the series, the one with a wedding-night scene, until they got to high school. A few years later, she became a librarian in a middle school, her first library job, and began making decisions about what was appropriate not just for her daughters but also for hundreds of students. She ordered a book for the library called “The Summer of Owen Todd,” a young-adult novel about an 11-year-old boy who is sexually assaulted by an older man, and she started having reservations. Would she want her kids to read it? There had to be a different way of thinking about it. What if there was a student here, right now, who was sexually assaulted by an adult they were told to trust? What if this book could help them? The book went back on the shelf.
Because of Florida’s punitive laws, Tania is no longer able to make those decisions without risking prosecution. Exhausted by a job that no longer valued her expertise and harassed by outside groups intent on making everyone toe the line on their political agenda, she decided to leave the job she once loved.
She had wanted to leave on her own terms. But as she walked out, she wasn’t sure that was what she had done.
Lights out. Doors locked.
This 21st-century media center was now closed and would remain so until a new librarian walked in and saw what awaited: 11,600 books on the shelves, and, on the desk, one purple folder containing 79 pages of Florida laws and a short note from the previous librarian.
“You might find this helpful,” it read.
You should read the whole article here.
Could this sort of thing happen in Marietta City Schools?
You bet it could. It starts with removing one or two books. Well-intentioned administrators and board members believe removing a few will minimize the propaganda-filled public anger. But this routinely escalates to a handful, and before you know it the entire library is at risk. On September 12, 2023, the MCS Board of Education passed a Directive to the Superintendent that says the following: “Removal of Sexually Explicit Material: We direct you to remove sexually explicit material from our district that is defined collectively as obscene, pornographic, not age appropriate and without substantive historical or academic value.” You’ll note those emotionally charged words right out of Moms for Liberty propaganda are all over this directive. The School Board notes in the introduction to the directive that “the welfare, safety, and education of our students remain paramount.” Book banning enthusiasts claim students are harmed by books too.
Makes you wonder how talking points from an outside group wreaking havoc in Florida schools made it into school board policy in our own district.
Board members Jaillene Hunter and Jason Waters, architects of the Directive via Angela Orange, echo these talking points. Hunter conflated books with mature themes to movie ratings, stating “[W]e don’t allow an R, NC-17 or X-rated movie to be shown to minor children at any schools.” Waters told the MDJ that he wants to “protect kids and not have pornography in schools.” Keep in mind, he’s referring to books like The Color Purple, Atlas Shrugged, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, The Kite Runner and other college level titles as “pornography.” Pornography?
In addition to parroting partisan talking points, BOE members appear to be unaware that mature themed readings necessary for college bound adult learners (these are 17-, 18-, and 19-year-olds at Marietta High School!) are not and have never been available for elementary school students in their school libraries.
Given the swiftness with which our BOE is willing to slide into partisan propaganda with talking points and directives that disenfranchise our students and library staff, we at Marietta in the Middle question their fitness for this sacred role: Board of Education. These are the caretakers of learning, the stewards of student success, and they wantonly ban rather than protect rigorous reading material for our most mature students. In doing so, they seem to be wholly unaware of the unintended consequences for their staff.
Children’s author and poet Michael Morpurgo once said “It's the teacher that makes the difference, not the classroom.” Is the librarian, then, the lifeblood of the library? What will happen to our students and our books on the shelves, Marietta, when the librarians leave the library?