School Board Book Review Committee Meeting 3/8/22

001you say they changed [Music] is [Music] and [Music] hmm [Music] oh my gosh [Music] like [Music] thank you [Music] yes [Music] oh [Music] so you know chris hendricks okay so you also live in eastern yeah yes well yeah so he probably or maybe back when i was at arts yes is [Music] okay for two years [Music] yeah well one of the great [Music] you know things helps you maybe a little bit more [Music] every day [Music] okay [Music] they wanted to get it all out on paper [Music] so i'm trying for myself i'm trying to highlight the parts that are actually policy but so she lives [Music] foreign [Music] oh yeah [Music] well [Music] so [Music] okay as soon as everybody can get set we'll get started in just a few minutes okay i think

002it's about everyone is here looks like we're missing maybe one or two but we're gonna go ahead and get started um tonight we hope to finish up with our recommendations to take to the board i hope to present them to the school board next thursday on the 17th and turn in my report to them so tonight scott is with us this is scott bennett our school board attorney i've been on the phone with him a few times and um he has looked over all the recommendations he's kind of tried to consolidate them down into one policy to give us something to kind of look for look at uh just to be clear we are not actually writing the policy scott always writes helps write the policy and they go before the school board we look

003at it we tweak it we adjust it we add words we take out words we add paragraphs take out paragraphs edit it do whatever the board wants to do it's the board's pleasure to do with it what they will and then we will scott will we vote on this one twice since there's our is this just a revision this will be a total new policy okay so uh if it's the reason i'm asking is if there's a revision you usually just vote on it once if it's a total new policy as this will be you vote on it twice it has a first reading and a second reading at two consecutive school board meetings well they don't have to be consecutive just at two board meetings and the board always has the authority to go

004ahead and adopt it right away yeah so uh that's the procedure so this board is i mean this committee is actually not writing the policy we're just making recommendations because as you can see this has been a lot of work and and it's a lot more work than we could get to at a at a school board meeting so anyway tonight scott is going to be here and he's going to explain uh some of his uh reasoning for the policies that which he's come up with and i'm going to turn it over to scott sure thank you mr so um i guess before i dive into this one of the there are there are two overarching issues that that inform any kind of policy that that guides a local board of education uh in terms

005of how it reviews materials uh there's obviously the overriding concern of the first amendment that is is an absolute third rail that we cannot violate we also have the concept that the local boards of education are empowered with the is that better okay local boards of education are also the organs of government where the community expresses its standards for what education should entail um and it's it's the mechanism whereby the community speaks its values whatever those values may be in in this debate oftentimes people have asked the question well who determines community values at some level it's the voters but the voters then speak those values into the election process and then the the soon to be 11 members of the hamilton county board of education reflect those values and guide the development of policy

006so we've got those two competing considerations and they don't have to be competing they can be very complimentary and in this debate i think there's been some tacit understanding that there are some things that uh that may be difficult to have in schools but they still add value there there's also some tacit agreement that there are some things that are are difficult and they don't need to be at a particular level um and and where where you dry the line may be some sexually explicit material does it need to be in elementary schools maybe maybe that's where you draw the line maybe you are okay with sexually explicit material but you have a problem with a text that maybe teaches someone how to build a pipe bomb out of readily available materials from the garage

007maybe that's where you draw the line i think most people believe that there's a line the question becomes where do you draw that line and i would respectfully suggest that that's the job of the school board informed by the constitution pursuant to a well-established policy uh and i say well established because anytime you make an ad hoc shoot from the hip decision very often you're not reacting to the overall tenor of the work maybe you're reacting to a hot button issue and that can be problematic and so the supreme court has given us some pretty good guidance that that whenever you're following a well-thought-out process to review the value of a work and maybe it's difficult parts over against its literary value if you make a decision that doesn't conform to community standards courts are

008going to give great deference to that decision but if you're reacting to ideas or policy positions or political statements that you don't like then that's a different problem there you're getting into what we call orthodoxy of thought and that's something that the first amendment tells us we guard against we believe in the marketplace of ideas so there's very definitely a balancing test so anyway i'm going to walk through my my edits and i i'm under no illusion there many of you are going to say i don't like this and i'm kind of used to that in my role and that's okay where the rubber will meet the road quite honestly is in review committees when there is a case-by-case review of the book in question what the board is what i hope to do is

009guide the board and the development of the policy so the policy can advise the administration this is what we expect you to do okay so if you if you go through um 4 and you go down to line 26. i i heard in some of the discussions and and by the way i apologize i haven't been able to be here for some of these a coaching mock trial team and um fortunately they're doing very well but i've been having to take assume those responsibilities uh when y'all been meeting so if you look at line 26 one of the concerns that some committee members had was that you didn't really know um how to be guided by particular attention when paid to addressing the suitability of instructional materials etc etc and so what i wanted to

010do was kind of loop that down to some other aspects of the policy so that we had a little bit clearer guidance and so i have here as set forth below um and then i changed the the word sensitive to offensive to community standards and the reason being is is there are a lot of things that are sensitive that don't meet the constitutional test of something that we need to remove um when you talk about something that's sensitive that that is not constitutionally clear and you may say well offensive to community standards may not be either but that's but that's at least something that the law recognizes is important um so so moving down further but because i've looped this standard into 403 which i think is is where really the rubber is going to

011meet the road i've changed the heading here from criteria for selection to criteria for review of material because i think one of the things that's been brought to the board's attention is that there are actually a lot of works currently in school libraries that i mean i don't think i've been at board meetings when when these these works have been read but they've been kind of painful to hear and so the people have been bringing these works to the board's attention have been making the point well if it's painful for you to hear why is it in a public school library and and there may be a legitimate answer to that question but the board is not equipped to know that because the board doesn't sit as a giant book club going through and looking

012at each of these books right there has to be a process that process is going to be in four four or three and we'll talk about that in a minute so the preamble to this section is it's a recognition that some materials even if they have educational merit may not be suitable for inclusion the instructional program of the school or in the library so it's a recognition there's a balancing test here that's what it is there's a balancing test not every work is going to be automatically excluded or included there has to be a balancing test when initially selecting materials accepting donations of materials or reviewing materials for their continued use per 403 the administration will consider the following criteria and all that is is basically the same as before except if you go down

013to the very bottom i've tried to to give some some constitutionally sound guidance to what we talked about above about particular attention will be paid and so the language that i've that i've i've used and this borrows from the pico case no it's not it's by no means verbatim but it but it reflects the concepts of the supreme court case the extent to which the concept may be considered offensive to community standards on the basis of profane language graphic depictions of sex i'm sorry of violence or sex etc so that's a consideration so you look at these other things that that establish the worth of the of the work in the preceding bullet points and then down here how do you tell that something is offensive well you look at the extent to which the

014content may be considered defensive to community standards on the basis of propane language graphic depictions of violence or sex etc and the etc is is a tip of the hat to the fact that there's probably something out there that we haven't thought of but but we're not talking about ideas that make us uncomfortable we're not talking about uh opposition in the vietnam war right we're talking about something that that is a vulgar nature that is as the supreme court says kind of flies against what we're trying to do is in terms of of creating models citizens and inculcate values of decency however keep reading so provided otherwise offensive materials may still be used if their relative literary value as measured in part by the criteria above outweighs the effectiveness of the content and so that's

015a recognition that our ela folks our english language arts folks may say gosh this is a difficult work it's hard to read but there is some value to it and and what resonated with me and mr when you can remember the name of the book i could probably i can't but it was the book that joe smith talked about uh far from the tree far from the tree so so he was describing how it was a really really hard book for him to read it was it really bothered him but he also said this is a great book it really it resonated with him and so there's a recognition that sometimes difficult books still have good value and so what we have to do as a public education system is have a is have a

016process where it's vetted and that is weight but keep reading further provided the jet well i'm sorry um outweighs the efficientness of the content the board gets to figure that one out i'm gonna i'm gonna i said keep reading a lie it's further down we'll keep reading but we'll get to in just a second um so again there's a balancing test that we have to apply and it's not something that we can apply from the hip it really does have to be a committee to assess the relative worth of the book and i say book obviously you'll understand what i mean in this day and age it could be any kind of material right almost any kind of literary material that's in this category all right so library collection and optional materials i made a

017note about donated materials that those who should be vetted to look at the very very end in the event the administration or the board determines that a work is offensive but nevertheless offers literary value then steps will be taken to advise parents or guardians when their students have access to any such material and that's just sort of like a parental advisory uh so it's not that that some of these works come out and by the way i'm not sold on any of this language and i'm going to i'm going to ask jamie and his team maybe to look at this and offer some comment on whether it makes sense to the administration before we actually kick it to the ward but but the recognition here is there may be a work that is that's difficult

018it's hard but it still carries value and maybe it does offer something useful to our students in balance so what do we do the recognition is that parents have a right to know right because parents still are are the ones who are in charge of raising their kids um the fact that the students are here in our system for most of the week doesn't mean that we supplant parents so it's a recognition there's a balance coupled with parents have a right to know and i and there must be a way that we could we could uh advise parents either through through um power school or something or maybe i don't know this is where this is where my role as a lawyer ends because i don't really know the operations here but i'm sure there's

019something that he's done rhonda you want to go into yeah the reason that he went ahead because he they were he's going to work them hand in glove one had to he couldn't do one without the other and you have made some changes but uh to this one by putting the criteria in there so i think why don't you just go on and finish up and or do you want to ask anybody that has a problem with this you want to do that first your community okay well this let's ask if anyone has any uh comments about this one policy before we move on okay [Music] i am still wondering which reading material we're looking at because we've gotten different charges and at first i thought it was just library books then we've mentioned other

020things and then you brought in ela pieces so that's now curriculum and that seems to have a different um policy built around it so what exactly are we charged with looking at so i can't answer the question what what this committee wants to assume is its charge my my role is to help the board understand and develop policy one of my roles is helping board understand and develop policy and to address some of the concerns that i felt that both the committee this committee has had but also the board has had but also some of the of the parents who have spoken to the board my thought was fundamentally we look at 4403 because is the vehicle whereby we reconsider instructional materials and textbooks and so that's a very broad loop if i'm going to

021change if i'm going to edit 4403 then i need to take a look at 4402 as well because if you look at line 30 it was 30 it's 33 the criteria that right there the reason i came back to 402 honestly is because i've looked at policies from literally around the country in terms of what are some of the considerations that review committees often look at and i think this is a really well developed set of criteria and maybe doesn't does it really guide the administration as a as clearly about what is offensive um it doesn't really inform how you balance but if you're trying to assess literary merit these bullet points by the way i have to apologize for my formatting i am i'm not a particularly effective legal secretary um so i apologize

022for the formatting here but so i rather than copying everything from 40402 and putting it into 4403 i thought it'd be more efficient to change 4402 as part of my edits to 4.3 if that makes some sense and so while here i just tweaked this policy as well i hope that makes some sense you asked me what time it was and i kind of told you how i built the clock this we didn't get into ela he just brought that into that was for instance we're not doing ela yeah okay and and if you look at the assumption here is that whoever um well you want to take that back so i i told you that i've spent so much time looking at so many different policies one of the things that was rattling around

023in my head is um you might want to talk to an ela specialist about the relative value of a work but but i haven't changed that to 4 403 because i thought it was going a little too far that was a that's an idea up here that hasn't made it to paper i apologize and then have have you read the librarian handbook because i read the librarian bill of rights okay i was wondering because you mentioned a committee would determine the if a piece of literature has enough merit educational value to merit the language or whatever offensive material it might contain but the librarians already have that in play so by the tennessee library i mean by multiple professional standards so i wonder why we would add another committee when they they're already doing that

024and to such a high level of standards that's common across the country so i'm going to disagree a little bit with what you said not because they're not working to a high to a high set of standards but rather because of the library bill of rights their ethical considerations are different from what a local board of educations might be under the library bill of rights they actually have an ethical obligation to make more materials available to students than the hamilton county board of education might think is appropriate for instance if you look at article article 5 of the library bill of rights it speaks to information should not be deprived of students on the basis of their age well if you follow that to its logical conclusion then why not make the handmade stale available

025to elementary students likewise if you look at article 7 of the library bill of rights it talks about people who use the library are entitled to confidentiality regardless of all of these considerations and i think i think as a matter of public policy the board of education would respectfully disagree while at the same time recognizing ethical obligations that librarians have i think they would take and i can't speak for the board i don't presume to um but i but i think that the the board would say you know we respect your professional obligations here but as the elected representatives of hamilton county we have a role in deciding what's appropriate as well so i have a question about that sure because they're not just using just the library bill of librarian bill of rights there

026they have other things in place laid out in the handbook and they do take consideration into age appropriate and they list their resources the credited resources by which they choose and they and also librarians also have different student bodies so some might have a k-12 library some might have just a high school library some might have a middle school high school library so they have to take that into consideration and it's all laid out in the handbook and it's not just they're not just using the bill of rights right and i understand that my point my point isn't to try to pigeonhole what i know is a complicated decision-making process for librarians my point is to recognize that fundamentally is to roll the board of education to make these decisions now they need to be

027informed decisions and i think the librarians play a role in giving the board good information but it's not simply that it's not just that and so to that point i think the review committee of 4403 can look a little bit different um that's one area that i haven't i haven't changed because in part i would talk with the administration about the administrative procedures they use um in implementing can i may i say something about the lab how about the librarians bill of rights i think we're doing this thing backwards we're taking the library's bill of rights and we're trying to make our policy to fit that that's not the way this thing works the librarian's handbook should take our policy and make their handbook after our policy because the ala is ala is really nothing

028more than a union for librarians just like the hcea the nea is a union for teachers that's what the ala is they have members they advocate for their members they write all of the all of their guidelines they implement their guidelines and libraries they tell you to go against anyone that questions any of the rules that they made and then they say we have a legal arm that will come and represent you legally if somebody goes against the policies that we wrote or against the guidelines that we wrote for libraries it's kind of like a ever they're just in a circle and the school board's supposed to march to their drum and i don't and i don't appreciate that i mean it takes a lot of work to get on the school board we do

029it's hard to get elected you have to go through this process the people elect us they didn't elect this group this unknown group anymore we don't quote the hcea and stuff when we do our other policies i think we have in the past but we've taken all of that out because they are not elected they're not appointed and they're not accountable the school board is so i'm i'm tired of hearing that look at the librarian's handbook no the librarian's handbook needs to look at our policy that's why we spend all this time doing that because i've spent a lot of time this past week looking at the ala the tla all of these uh the aala i think is the other one and they're all entert they're all affiliates of each other so they all

030just write rules to complement each other and then like i say if some then that then they send out these letters that say don't let anyone censor anything in your library and if you do we have a legal counsel that's going to come after them and and okay okay well i'll let you go right ahead the reconsideration policy that's in the library handbook is exactly the board policy yeah i know the board policy took it that's just it the ala pretty much wrote the board policy on that and they did and i don't know it because it's the same pretty much am i right this is pretty much across i think the librarian handbook isn't just e-a-l-a well no it's not that it's actually referenced in multiple places at reference board policy so i i

031don't see it as backwards i actually see them i understand they build a lot of their stuff on ala but i'm not going to get sidetracked on that davey go ahead so mr bennett i have what is probably a two or three part question but i'll start with the first part which may mean that i don't need to ask some of the rest so i was wondering first if you could explain to me a little bit more your edit for line 33 in board policy 402 uh you changed it from criteria of selection to criteria for review of material could you talk a little bit more about what you're getting at there why you chose to remove the word selection and add those three words yes sir um as i was explaining earlier in response

032to the lady we need to have a criteria for how we review material under 403 there really isn't anything spelled out in 404403 to guide the committee in terms of how to weigh these competing considerations and in my opinion uh if the committee were to recommend the removal of a particular book and it didn't have criteria spelled out that it was following i think that would be constitutionally infirm we need to provide guidance from the board before something is removed so that was the reason that i changed this language from criteria for selection to criteria for review the two policies so part two and this is the part where i'm going to propose a flaw in the change and you will hopefully explain to me why it's not flaw so the way i read that

033part of the policy before it was setting a bar you must hit some of these criteria in order to be selected and by removing the word selection and making it review of material and then adding to that uh on the next page the the item eight the whole extent to which the content may consider considered offensive before all those criteria were positive things bars you have to hit to be selected and i'm just at reading this obviously tonight for the first time but at first blush it seems perhaps unintentionally to water everything down because now that extra one is not a positive bar to hit it's dealing like you said tying into that whole separate review thing and because we've removed selection from the start it seems to me to water down a little bit

034the clarity before that this is the minimum standard to select because like you said we're not curating a public library we have a variety of concerns that you mentioned so please explain to me where i may be mistaken well i don't know that you are i think that's a i think that's a that's a valid point and so i don't have a problem with criteria for selection or review of material because quite frankly depending upon what stage you are in in the process you're either selecting material to add or you're reviewing material for further consideration i think that's a that's a that's a well-taken observation and i'm i'm going to mark that and doodle on it for later as far as the last point um i am not completely sure i understand uh what i

035understand that other things are positive and this is is negative it's intended to be a consideration so it may be that you have have a work that has has educational purpose it contributes to the subject matter etc etc my concern about this particular policy as it's as it currently exists is that there is no toe hold for someone reviewing a work to balance the merit of the work against how difficult it might be and so i needed i believe the board needed i needed to give the board the board needed to be able to speak to the committee some criteria for how you balance a work that might be difficult i take new pride in authorship there's nothing here that is that is uh um inspired so um if you have some suggestions for some

036different language by all means send it to me during the week and i'll i'll be happy to to think about it and include it okay um so before then thank you for that and so before my final part i will just add now that offhand i think maybe that bullet should not be if we tighten that back up to criteria for selection maybe that bullet i think it's it's covering like you said it ties back to the review process it ties back to state law what it talks about for obscenity and harmful to minors maybe it shouldn't be one of the bullets though maybe it should be just its own language explaining this is part of what needs to be in the uh administration's process like some of the other paragraphs that aren't there um

037that you said that i actually considered having that as a separate paragraph you're not withstanding the above these these are some criteria my concern about having it as a separate paragraph honestly was that it was if it was a separate paragraph my thought was that it would swallow everything that came above rather than being a consideration so it's interesting i i was concerned that it would over emphasize it but it's a separate paragraph but i'm not opposed to that okay i'll i'll make the edit and i'll give some thought to it okay and i could see that point of view you know i'm coming from my point of view that if you looked through happened to look through this packet i know there's a lot in here but one of the things that i've been

038concerned about is ensuring as you mentioned and others have mentioned that balance at appropriate levels of cognitive development age appropriateness so i would i guess in my mind want that balancing of of value and potent offensiveness potentially in difficulty to be very explicitly considered for the different levels rather being tucked into a bullet point so that's my point of view um so your point's well taken and i will um what i may do is i may i may run an edit with that and to see what it looks like and show it to some folks my it is interesting my goal was for it not to over emphasize and swallow everything that came before it but i also understand what you're saying yeah okay thank you and so my final part is is there's um

039when you use uh the word is part of then that paragraph being added under criteria for selection or review of material whichever way that ends up you have the word accepting donations of materials so selecting materials accepting donations reviewing materials um i'm not sure how to phrase this question without just telling you what what i wanted so i guess i'd just say that it seems to me we could have a better word than accepting something like um receiving re well receiving it's still like you're not clearly making a judgment something like approving is the word that i would say approving donations and materials because accepting in my mind leaves in and maybe i'm being too picky a little bit of a hole there that well we considered it while accepting it but it didn't say

040that we have we don't accept it so again i may be nitpicking there but i would think approving might be better so i guess the question out of that then is do you see anything wrong with changing it to approve it no whatsoever thank you okay go ahead angela i have about four maybe five things um one he kind of touched on as far as the criteria for selection by changing that to review i kind of feel like it diminishes the selection process by taking that word out if we were to keep that in there could we not put for selection or reconsideration and that would apply to both because i was thinking that 4.402 is a selection of materials so not necessarily a review or reconsideration should be in this part of the policy

041that would be under 4.403 so if we're going to apply that as part of the criteria for selection that terminology i hope would stay in there so that we don't lose that as selection process um secondly under the second page line eight um in line with the idea that you were going along with with first amendment rights keeping similar to miller test type line items um is there a way to add as a whole um in there with that uh terminology kind of in line with the first amendment um criteria for how they review obscene material um so that we're judging a book on its whole and that's not deluded in that language i'm not sure how we would word that any other way to meet that request because it's like you need to do

042a book report on something before you kind of make that judgment so how we kind of make sure that that says we're we're making sure that it's otherwise defensive as a whole versus community standard as a whole um so that that stays kind of true to i guess if it went further up um legally it would kind of be in line with other areas yeah i understand what you're saying and um i'll give some thought to that one of the one of the things that i try to do when i'm i'm developing a policy is i tried i try to avoid legalese i believe it or not i mean rhonda would laugh at that um but i debated whether to use that language as a whole because i don't know what that i don't know

043that someone's going to understand when there's an offensive part versus what that does to the work as a whole um and i'll i'll give you a a very specific example um the mouse book up in men county the work as a whole very powerful but there were there were some very specific objections to the image of suicide some very serious concerns because because fundamentally this wasn't a book about the holocaust it was an eighth grade ela book um and and there was some concern about that particular image with some particular i'm familiar and so and so i i struggle with when as a whole as a constitutional standard is something that um that creates more confusion than clarity i'll give some thought to that because honestly i had that thought and the fact that that

044a committee member has raised that question i think maybe means i need to rethink about it i need to rethink it yeah i felt like it was kind of like in line with you know like the raw case and then miller and it's kind of been in that terminology for the supreme court that if if this went further that kind of is the standard that's already said so that was my my thought process well yeah yes but now you're thinking about a somewhat different standard for the supreme court than what um the suitability of a particular work for students in the school library um there that's the pico standard and the pico standard is a little bit different from from your points we'll take it i'll look that up i'm curious i'll your points will

045take and and it's something that i've been kind of struggling with um i'll think about it okay um the next question i had when we talked about donated materials was kind of to david's point and i guess when we put that line in there or or change how things enter or not i'm curious of i guess the district's part or role in that um and how that plans to play out as far as who is responsible for following that criteria within the district or public as to what that is because i feel like there are a lot of educators and a lot of people who would be really curious to how that process is um of of at the door i guess at that line like when you walk in who's responsible for um meeting

046that criteria because it's not librarians or it's not people paid by hamilton county there are lots and lots of organizations who participate as community partners and so who would be the the responsible party for that would we as an organization i'm volunteer with an organization i'm sure you know that has donated books to our school so would it be the literary experts we consulted would it be um people within the district that we consulted for these lists would it be the specific teachers that we consulted for the list like trying to figure out if we put that this wouldn't be there are we playing into the operational value of that or where would that where does that go because you're just saying nope we can't take this unless it meets this criteria does that mean

047you just don't take anything at this point because right there if there's not a criteria a responsible party set how does that happen well if i understood your question correctly i think you're asking whose responsibility is it at the school level to that the suitability of books are being donated yes well okay so i think the answer would be that's an administrative decision it's either the principal or the uh the librarian but i mean it's fundamentally it's it's the principal because he runs the school okay i mean that's as long as that's like that there's somebody in charge yeah the standard of whose path that the principal or the librarian or or the chair of the english department somebody is responsible for implementing war policy so sure i get i can take it okay okay

048and then the last thing i had was in relation to ronda's comments about the ala and them being a lobbyist organization um no i didn't say that i said they were union i didn't say i never used the word lobbyists no but they were affiliated but they are affiliation so when we're taking that into consideration i have a strong issue with the fact that our committee today is made up of at least five people all from one politically partisan affiliated group that has nothing to do yes it does that is well there may be six or seven or ten that's absolutely everybody said everybody has one voice ma'am i am not deaf i hear her speaking but can i finish my thought yes go ahead i do think there are concerns amongst our community not

049just myself that there are a misappropriated representation on our committee at least one noted not diverse one noted that we have a politically affiliated partisan group that has a mission to remove kids from public education on a large part of this committee so as we take into consideration of materials i think that that might be something that is a conflict of interest yes a conflict in in our process so i did want that noted as we talk about professional national organizations maybe not being the credible resource that we think we might need to point our focus inward and know exactly what resource we are as well okay that's fine uh go ahead rebecca i did have one question but now i have one comment and one question we have a school board member who wants

050to dismantle the school system so publicly said that um my only question is they're um here on the second page on line 12 it says library collection so i was wondering she and meg touched on this what the definition of library collection is in the context of line 10 where it says school library and classroom can we add the word library to classroom or could we just define library collection is that i don't know is that possible i see your question of your observation this day so um maybe what i need to do is add to line twelve no dated material will be entered into the library or classroom collections well i would put uh available collections or something because they can get it from the classroom from some group that comes in there's more

051ways of organization the internet their chromebooks but no matter where they come from they're gonna have to make the same well in the observation about about the internet there's a limit to what we can what we can filter on the internet even even on our on our web um i think i understand you're understood your point um got it um i had a couple of questions the committee that you wrote for oh no you finished rebecca okay go ahead go ahead yeah the committee that you referenced um will it be spelled out in the policy like who it's going to be made up of who will appoint or decide who's on the committee on what the makeup of it will be and will it be like at a school level committee or will it be

052at the district level i'm just curious about those things well the way it exists right now is spelled out in 4 403 and um before we go to 403 let me make one observation about 402 that i had spoken with scott about and i told him i would bring it up i still am not comfortable with line 13 on the second page it actually starts online about 12 again it says however there may be sensitive content contained in these books that was not previously reviewed by school personnel i don't think there should be any books there that's not previously reviewed by school personnel because that just gives a big old gaping hole there for somebody and maybe there to be a book that is very questionable and say well i'm sorry but this is one

053of those books that was not previously reviewed and we said that there were going to be books that were not previously reviewed i don't like that whole sentence myself if it says that every book that comes in has to be vetted i don't know how we can have books that are not previously reviewed it's i understand your concern um that that first of all that language is already there yeah but it's a recognition to the fact that librarians have a lot to do and um so do parents i i hear what you're saying and i'm not saying that you're wrong what i'm saying is as a practical matter if we apply the same issue to school principles you you need to check every single one of your ceiling titles um it it it's it's sometimes

054it's easier and we do get sued for that i'm very well aware of that but but sometimes it's easier to fix the one that falls in and then you replace them one at a time um there is a mechanism under the policy where a parent or a student can raise an issue and so that's dealt with on a case-by-case basis the board can require a periodic review of existing materials i just don't know how much time it's going to take or how much it would look like and that says by school personnel right so the librarians are also using reviews literary i mean so these books are being looked at by reviews sites other other type things so it's not just means the school personnel personally have not reviewed it right they're using other credible

055sources for review purposes oh could i ask one second part though um is does this policy allow for or provide for revisiting a book or a particular set of books like um you know if it wins a particular award or you know we realize that we need it for ap classes or just to be a well-rounded citizen when we get to college is a book that's going through this process and put out of the you know the schools is there an opportunity for it to be and reconsidered so to your first question about ap the 4402 i think actually recognizes that ap and ib works are are frequently dictated by outside um regulatory groups and so um if you're going to take ap you're going to take ib there are certain books you're going to

056read and it and it's understood that there's not going to be a lot of a wiggle room where the school administration can give you a pass on some book that you may find uncomfortable to your second point about is there a specific opportunity to reconsider it's not spelled out in the policy but i think that's necessarily implied um because when you're talking about changing well frankly evolving community standards so maybe a book is is deemed um inappropriate five years ago but because of different current events maybe because of um i mean i i'm thinking back in time i read some really rough things in in the late 80s early 90s when i was when i was looking at going to the foreign service um studying the soviet union i'm now dusting off that book collection

057um there so so i'm not saying that we wait 40 years to review something i should have just dated myself um but but your points well taken is there a is there an opportunity to review something yeah i think so i think you look you go through the criteria that that is in 442 and maybe maybe your calculus changes so um maybe suddenly the contribution of the subject matter to the curriculum to the interest of students maybe that changes in view of changing circumstances timeliness or permanence of the content maybe that changes know i think in that scenario i think a a librarian or an ela teacher or an ela coach would be uh would be wise to maybe go back to whatever body had had made the decision maybe it was the the school

058level review committee or maybe it was maybe it was the board and make the case you know under under the circumstances we'd like to have this reconsidered i think that should be worked into the administrative procedures um which were kind of writing in midair so i think i think that's a great point so um was there someone else okay so i was going i don't know if this is more appropriate for the general discussion or the questions for board attorney portion but seeing that it ties into i believe it ties into what miss thurman and mr bennett just raised is is i will point out definitely the horse has been beaten to death but in my suggestions in the packet so directly related to what ms thurman said where there's still this language about well

059there may be things in there that haven't been reviewed and then mr bennett said well maybe some people would notice in that case and bring it back so the question of this is so i had some language in here that uh it would be the details would be up to the administration but policy language specifying a prompt determination i in my case i put by school administrator ela chair and a librarian or teacher as to whether the material may be harmful to minors and this was if it's there and it has not been reviewed as ms thurman raised that there's this language in there that things may have not been reviewed and the that just seems to chain backwards to me to the other suggestion that i had made which is is not in in

060mr bennett's version which is we need some explicit language saying we need documentation of how this whole process happen we know for the past it's not currently there and maybe it will be added over time but for things that it isn't i feel like to the points that mrs thurman and mr bennett said this would help that so i guess the question out of that if i could i guess direct that to mr bennett is is there a reason of policy that it would be a bad idea to specify in policy that there needs to be documentation not getting too much into the weeds of exactly what it is but that there needs to be and then related to that is it a problem to have language saying this is what you do for something

061that doesn't have policy because we just acknowledge there's going to be things that don't have documentation and policy so i'm not sure i understood the second half of that question so let me let me deal with the first and maybe maybe eliminate the second so um if you look forward to 4 403 and in particular new line 30. of course the board has the ultimate decision on whether something is or isn't appropriate and so what i would have baked into this is the board has the discretion to sustain the review committee on the record or to grant a new hearing and and what i intend by that and then this this is again an administrative procedure is the review committee needs to have minutes um it's conducting a hearing and and there there are procedures

062that the administration follows when we are conducting hearings of all sorts um whether it's a disciplinary review whether it's involving a an employee there's a process that we follow internally for these these hearings and so my way of thinking is it will look a lot like that there will be a record developed from okay what is the complaint okay let's be sure we understand the complaint okay so we've what says the rest of the team and then there's a there's a discussion and then a decision so my thought here is that that if someone appeals to the board were you talking about on the front end though you're talking about accountability on the front end before it gets there he was wanting somebody to sign off on it somebody to go back to it's on

063the front i apologize well it's it's a little bit of a in a little bit of b because you can't have language you don't need language to fix when something wasn't reviewed and documented if you don't have language requiring documentation so the two-part concern for me well one is going forward are we documenting to make sure that the process is really happening so we can go back and look but then part two is it seems to me we have and we still have some jeopardy here for the system that we're acknowledging there are things that have not been reviewed directly were not reviewed and then we say well there's this whole process you need to go through which very clearly is a lengthy process so the question becomes is it advisable i would say it's

064advisable but is it unusual to have some kind of emergency prompt process for a quick judgment when you don't have that documentation so i think i'm vulnerable okay so so initially there's no liability for having a book in the library that hasn't been reviewed it's just a book um it's it doesn't reach out and grab you and make you read it so you're not going to be assaulted by a book i guess unless if another student does it so so there's no liability for having an inert book sitting on the shelf and and and it's just there so the liability piece doesn't concern me what i'm what i'm concerned about is if we have something that is there it's been there for a while and now we're saying it doesn't need to be there we're

065now changing the status quo and so we need to have some documentation for why we're changing that status quo i think the policy does a good job with that and again our administrative procedures are going to are going to sharpen that point um i don't have though we don't typically the board doesn't typically review administrative procedures because it's sort of like a how-to manual um for how the administration implements a particular policy let me go back to i'm glad you clarified that rhonda because i completely missed it to to your point about the selection of materials my anticipation would be that whoever is vetting this at the school level they're going through the the process and it may be an email you principal smith i'd like to get some of you know these books for

066the library here's their cost here are some considerations you'll please see the attached that's sufficient documentation on the front end to show that someone has done their due diligence at least in my book it is i mean jamie may have to protect i i think that satisfies our due diligence okay i think if you're going to remove it you got to dig a little bit deeper um i think i've covered your questions i think so i just have one clarification i want to get there when because you mentioned liability i've been trying so far to avoid hypothetical cases but in this case i don't know another way to ask it is so let's say we have um a child with with some mental health issues and uh maybe they've gone and seen treatment and then

067they've been cleared to go back to school but i can speak from experience it's always a very careful line with with these kids things that you might not expect can cause them to regress and let's say there's a book on the shelf which unexpectedly in there depicts some sort of violent or suicidal behavior and then the kid acts out uh so we're not liable for that as a system if if we knew that if we we've acknowledged that there may be stuff in there no one's reviewed it turns out this book is sitting in a middle school library uh and probably wasn't appropriate for middle school and but nobody caught it and uh then a student who has mental health issues is is um regresses due to having picked that up and and hurts themselves

068or others we're not liable as a system for that i would have a hard time connecting those dots to liability that the standard for for liability for negligence in the state of tennessee is you knew or should have known of certain facts that gave rise to a duty to act you negligently failed to act and the resulting injury is the result of your failure to act that's garden variety negligence okay there are a lot of in your in your hypothetical there are a lot of predicates that someone would have to jump over including knowing that the book is in the library well i didn't know and and i and and and the exercise of do care i wouldn't there's no reason i would have known because i've got librarians in the room um there's a

069dear lady from from nolan elementary approximately how many roughly nine thousand books on average at any given school yeah okay so so if if we assume that that's correct i was gonna let's go 18 000 you said it's an average so so you know my my children went to nolan so that's the one that i'm saying nine thousand more or less eighteen thousand and no one wow okay so i would suggest that um that to expect the librarian at nolen to know what her predecessors going back 10 years or more may have put in the library is is an unreasonable ask but let's change that let's change well if i could interject though so you actually i expected that because so now my second part of the question is so now let's say somebody has

070brought up this book has something that on the face of it is clearly inappropriate and so we've got this long process but the book i believe the process says the book stays on the shelf so then now we know but we said the book stays on the shelf and then something happens and perhaps it's been brought up because it's in the news and now somebody goes out and seeks it out and they act out because of that are we uh liable at that point even there i think that's too tenuous of a connection there's another principle that we have in negligence law called proximate cause and so it's got to be not just the cause and fact that's going to be the legal cause and what you would have to connect there is that the

071school officials actually knew that this child with his proclivities was somehow endangered by this particular book and you knew that he was going to gravitate toward that look in in the universe is that a series of possibilities yes but i would frankly hope that if we knew that we had a child with those tendencies we would already have a different safety net around that kid so that the last thing we're worried about is the book in the library i understand the question um and you know being being an attorney i live in the world of what ifs um you know think about it no one ever calls us with good news it's always something bad happens so i live in the world of what is um except could you talk a little bit more about

072that safety net because you know i know that when kids are returned to school you you have a lot of very careful restrictions on making sure you do not discriminate against that child due to past mental health issues so how would that safety net work when on the one hand you're trying to include them and and get them back to normalcy but i mean are you supposed to as a teacher i'm thinking as a teacher here be like when when you've got this book on the shelf that's that's controversial be like you know and everybody's there and be like bob you you stay by me and keep an eye on him so he doesn't touch this book and what if he does touch this book yeah so what does that safety net look like so

073honestly i think we're going kind of far afield um not knowing the specific kid and not knowing what we're talking about i don't know that i can go into too many hypotheticals but but if we have if we have a child who um i don't know it's difficult for me to answer that question probably the best way i can say it is that not knowing a specific kid and not knowing what his 504 plan would look like i'm a little uncomfortable um kind of pulling something out of thin air and and i don't know that it's the work of this committee or even the board to figure out what that looks like um my thought would be if i'm talking to the 504 coordinator and someone advocating on behalf of that child my thought is

074as part of our due diligence i'm going to want to know what this kid's triggers are and then we're going to work to manage those triggers and my concern would be we were going to have 14 or 15 other things before we get to the library not that there couldn't be a trigger there i'm not saying that at all i'm saying that what you're describing is a very complex landscape and it's it's a little difficult for me to pick out one part of it in a vacuum i agree it's it's complex which is at the risk of pontificating for just a moment it's puzzling to me why we wouldn't have an emergency escape valve rather than just mandating the book stays on the shelf when it may be something where it's when the professionals at

075the school look at it to be clear uh they're like this has got to go and right now their hands are tied if it turns out that as we've admitted in the policy that there's stuff that's in the uh request for reconsideration correct okay we are looking at redoing the request for reconsideration okay that that's also on the table that scott has also been looking at different ones from all around and we're not going to get into that right now but i've been looking at one but but i do i have a problem with that it stays on the shelf that was one of the questions that that i had but we are looking to redo the request for reconsideration as well so we'll certainly when that comes about then that's where that is and

076the last thing that i'm that i'll say it'll be i would be i'll be careful how i say this we're not going to decide the content of a library in the basis of one child we're going to decide the content of the library or or the curriculum or or something else based upon educational standards the curriculum is driven by the state standards so i mean really with removing something from the library it's going to have to hit criteria be about being offensive what you're talking about is you have a piece of material that maybe doesn't get removed from the library because it doesn't meet our standards of offensiveness but it's a trigger for a particular child i don't know that we remove a book i don't know that we give a child's health condition a

077veto over what's in the library but i hesitate to say that that's the the conclusion because again i'm struggling with how we balance the first amendment considerations i i guess i should be clear two parts to what you said is one is i i know i think at least partially in the current policy for reconsideration and i would assume going forward it's we we have the language about uh harmful to minors which comes from the state language which is includes offensive but also it's broader than that if i recall the harmful to minor standard and then part two um just to clarify i'm not talking about a a book that may just be harmful to one kid but that's the most serious case we're talking about hopefully the books that upon either short or long

078review eventually we will be like this was inappropriate to be at this age level at this school and and so that's what i'm worried about is then the long process will also determine it wasn't appropriate for that age level but then in the short term we have this condition that we have to so we can be sensitive to the rest of the committee members time and also the work that we still need to do with other policies let me commit to this with you let me let me read carefully the comments that you have offered in the packet and maybe you and i can connect so that i can be sure that i understand what it is you're concerned about so that i because because i want to do justice to your concerns and i

079feel like i don't understand them well enough to do that right now sure okay all right uh down there on the end she had her hand up a minute ago yeah yeah hi um a couple of comments i will just sorry i'll um reiterate some of what angela pointed out earlier just kind of to put on the record and this is in 4.402 on the last page the new language that you added i think it would be helpful if we added the word contemporary before community standards especially in light of what you were talking about that this may evolve over time that maybe something that was inappropriate 10 years ago or offensive to community standards in light of current events would no longer be you know that's at line eight that would be yeah the

080new line eight just adding the word contemporary and then i would um just kind of second angela's comment about taking the work as a whole i'm not exactly sure where to fit that in this is you know we're just getting this i know where it is tonight i know where i would put that i just would encourage you yeah i've kind of added my voice to that column yeah i i know where to put that if i include it my concern well we already hit it i understand yeah there's when you're looking at something for inclusion in the school library it's a different calculus than whether the work as a whole is obscene so i understand when you're looking at the miller standard it's it's you are looking at the work as a whole and

081i think that's a valuable admonition um but you can have hot spots in a particular work that tips the balance it i hear what you're saying and i i would just add my voice as a member of the community that i don't think a single hot spot within a book should override its inclusion in any collection i understand what you're saying and i will commit to looking at that because i appreciate it i think it's i think it's valuable thought um and i hope i don't think it's unworkable as just i don't think it's too confusing and and i hope it's come across that that i i'm really struggling with trying to strike the right balance because there's a there's a right balance and and what what someone finds objectionable in this season um two

082years from now it may be very very very different about the policy so to follow on that point mr bennett standards will change sure just to follow on that point you you know i think mr mckissick brought up the idea of bringing up a book that was maybe rejected previously for reconsideration um there's two different places both in 4.402 and 4.403 that says the judgment of the board shall be final so that to me if i were a librarian or if i were a principal i would say this book was rejected like that door is closed so i would just if we are going to consider that books could be brought back up for reconsideration i think that needs to be written in the policy in a clearer way i'll i'll give that some thought

083yeah maybe it's an additional sentence maybe it's somewhere else but yeah this to me looks like a very closed door well and it is for that minute it is it is for them i mean and we always vote on it and one of the things that we say all the time is that one board can't bind the next so um so maybe that that's the well i guess because because we live there we we know that but um my thought is that the best place to do that is probably in the administrative procedures because you're right if the board has said that we don't think this is appropriate i think that does carry some weight and so i think if a librarian wants it to be reconsidered or if a principal wants it to be

084reconsidered i think that there needs to be um the requests for reconsideration for the librarians possibly or yeah yeah there's so are you saying you're considering a whole new policy no no not 4.4 administrative procedures no i yeah i understand my thought is that there's that there's a mechanism in place anytime the director of schools says i'd like the board to rethink something that happens with some regularity so i i hear what you're saying it sounds final in the world where we live in it it doesn't feel that way to me okay um but well this policy is also written for the community to understand how to complain about books so i think it needs to be written in a way that both you and the community understand i think they're saying after it gets

085to the board after we vote on it there's nobody above us to say go ahead that we are the final step in the process i think that's pretty much how it's worded not final for ever and ever all men but final for today because there's nowhere else to go the board's the tip of the iceberg so i'm making notes so i i hear what you're saying um i will chew on it and and everything else okay angela um to tie in what she was saying i know some of the other districts have added into their reconsideration for or their public or community uh the other form sorry let me figure out the words here the one that you said that you're looking to revamp that's not part of 4.402 or four through three it's the

086actual form that you fill out and it says that that policy once decided upon i know other districts have like it can be re what i think she's tying into is this cannot come back up for re-review for three months six months etc um or to add the terminology per board session you know like i guess every two years because you guys rotate some seats every two years so that being in there or at least in that um request for review of material policy so that the public is aware and it's not just assumed based off of other dense policy that the public isn't quite as in tune with so i think that was the notes that we were hoping would get taken um the other thing i had was to be sensitive to um

087mr kellman's uh request about like a hypothetical situation um between i guess jamie or yourself in history of our school district without of course giving detailed information have we had a number of instances where there have been behavioral or liability issues in our district because of a book liability no behavior i wouldn't know i'm just curious if we've had a history of that that we could look at or dive into and see um any patterns or anything along those lines obviously i i didn't mean you know go ahead i'm not aware if that data exists i think a lot of that's handled at the school level okay and that's curious if any if without because i would think some of that might be under hipaa or or something like that that might not be able

088to be shared but i didn't know if that was collected it wouldn't be hepa um mental health issues i thought it might be and i think i mean i understand i can i can come up with with hypotheticals that would make great law school problems um i'm not aware and i'm not saying there aren't any i was just curious but but so i don't i don't i don't take this as a well it's never happened i didn't take it i don't take your comment or your comment is it's never happened before don't worry about it oh yeah so i'll just add in in my career i've i've taught multiple wonderful students who were dealing with mental health issues and i'll just say that my hypothetical was very much not frivolous in in putting it there

089not that you're implying that it is but just you know obviously you cannot go into details uh um but i definitely see it is is a a real concern of that we have to at least think about thank you okay go ahead jane yeah so um the question i have is in this policy or in this process is there anything that um could maybe like trigger an equity book or a civil rights look when you all begin to realize like all of the books that are being challenged are like books um by black authors latino authors lgbt authors and things does this allow for anyone to come in and address that issue as well so if i understand your question correctly you're asking i guess what is the oversight for a school by school review

090and the answer there is the office of civil rights in atlanta has jurisdiction to consider any issue and so so let's let's do a parallel so several years ago there was a question about whether the district was disproportionately suspending minority students relative to to to non-minority students and if you think about it the first the first thought would be well how would that be possible because you're looking at at decisions made at schools that are separate and distinct and they're not getting together to talk about um the decision that they're making hey here's what i'm gonna do with this kid what are you gonna do with that kid right so there's not any kind of conversation about this and yet one of the questions that the ocr might ask is is there a systemic bias

091right and that's something that in districts literally around the country the ocr has been equipped to ask questions about for decades so i believe to answer your question i believe that if what we started to see was what looked like a systematic exclusion of authors on the basis of minority groups or or some other in the term we use is an invidious classification there's an invidious classification we're only excluding authors who fit within a certain group um the ocr would have oversight to come in and ask the question okay or have you created a title ix issue have you created a title six issue um so so that would be the mechanism is there someone in the district who's like looking at that or who would be you know i think they're just looking at

092the content of the book i mean who knows i don't know what color these authors are i have i haven't a clue i don't know i don't know what their sexuality is we're just looking at the content of the material of the in the books so i don't know i mean no no where is it written this author is black or this author that leads to the systemic issue you might not know but if the list continues to be populated with marginalized groups but if it's just done by the content yeah if it's just done by the content and you and friend really don't even know who the author is you're just doing by the content then how yeah and that's where i was going and so it said the district's position would be well

093we can't speak to the to the trends but let's look at the individual data and so we would then look at the record which gets us back to what's talking about earlier okay so let's take this book all right so this is this is written by um a latino author why was it excluded and okay and so you defend the merits of that decision we're going to look at this one you defend the merits of that decision and so conceptually i can see how this would be uh how this would be an issue that the ocr might look at i can see how that might happen and then but and then you'd have to defend the decision one at a time and the defense would be well the community because i don't know i don't

094know who these authors are i just don't know and i specifically did not look because i don't want to be biased in any way about anything i just wanted to read the material and so the the defense again would be well okay this this violates our our standard for for what is offensive um we weighed we weighed it against these considerations and we found it lacking um and here's some meals to to think about the way that this is set up right now you have the possibility where one school could say we find that this does not violate our community standards and so it's not removed and another school could say we find this very very yeah because that wasn't how i picked it up as you explained it right it's so so depending upon

095what we're talking about whether it's a system-wide decision or if it's a school-based decision you could you could get different results um and that's something that jamie and i were talking about beforehand sometimes you're going to have school-wide books right and they may not be appropriate for anybody sometimes that's cool about the system sorry system-wide other times it may be the book only exists in one school because it was donated by you know an alumnus or there was a a community group or getting into the weeds of what ifs i'm imagining a world in which um one side of the county may say this isn't this is it we don't want this in our school but we're not going to speak for you if you if if this if this book is valuable we're not

096going to i can see room within the policy for that we'll have to see i would not say that this is an in the weeds thing it's a very in the moment thing and it's talked about at multiple board meetings so i think his question is right along with what is going on in the board meetings in in central office i would not call that in the weeds what what what's going on in the board what meetings and in the central office when you're talking about equity just talked about it multiple yeah i'm talking about books i'm talking about about one book for one school i'm not talking i mean i understand well his cons his concept was not in the weeds i think it was very appropriate and i wasn't trying to suggest he

097was in the weeds i was saying i was getting into the weeds to try to talk about he was getting in the way sometimes i sometimes um one of my many flaws is i give more information when maybe i should give less because i'm trying because i'm trying to give people an understanding of the landscape it's a little hard to do with hypotheticals but anyway i hope that you're satisfied okay we're going to start wrapping this up so if you have any more thoughts we need because we need to go on to 503 and let him explain a little bit about that i mean 500. where are we 403. yeah four four or three uh okay we're going to let the ones that have their hands up now and then i have one other uh

098thing that uh i i want to say and so go ahead and uh we'll start with you right there okay i just wanted to talk about or ask about a couple of words that are used in here just to get clarity on them so um when you were saying mr moon was saying about um a line where the personnel may not review um that was on uh 13 on the second page of 4.402 um line 13 that said um there might be sensitive content contained in these books that was not previously reviewed by school personnel i think that there's some confusion about reviewed versus reading because the school librarians are in fact reviewing and they can tell you when they look up the professional reviews what the general concept of the book is they can

099say why that they thought it would be good for the book it's it's logistically uh i don't want to say impossible but i guess i would say very challenging for a librarian to be responsible for reading every book that comes into the library or that exists in the library so if we're going to say reviewed versus reading i want to say that the librarians are in fact reviewing and asking so we can just take this out because they're being reviewed then so we can say they're so they're not any books that are not previously reviewed so they've all been there could be legacy books yes they're like like they've all been previously reviewed by somebody i'm not saying librarians take this line out so then somebody's responsible correct so there's not any so uh says

100there may be sensitivity i just wanted to be clear that there may be so that whole line they all have to be previously reviewed and then so somebody's approved them already at some point in time yes somebody said so they're all so that line is just not necessary i just wanted to get clarity about whether or not the cya for the district yeah that's up to you if you want to take that out but that's what i say i'm i'm tired of cya i'm tired i just wanted responsibility that's what i want to be clear about the idea of reading versus reviewing because it's just unless there's going to be you know two or three librarians at every elementary school to read them constantly there's not going to be okay well nobody say anything about

101reading it says uh reviewing i'm just going to like i said but you said they've been reviewed so and my other question is about um on page 1 the line 27 on 4.402 um that says the addition has been offensive to community standards so i wanted to ask a question about like what community how community is being defined because the consideration the reconsideration policy the committee review process that's in the school librarian handbook includes members of the community um and so that would be the community there at that one school as you were saying mr bennett that it would be a school by school book by book process it could be so in the event that we're doing a you know system-wide situation like how would we be defining community like how do you define

102community as it's used in this because i think we've brought it up several times that we aren't necessarily um 100 you know representative of the community demographics even just based on not even age or race or income in this room so like how would we define which community so this committee is not intended to be um he's not going to be making decisions on a book by book basis so the committee that's set up in 4 403 which i guess we'll get to in a minute the review committee consists of the executive director or the director of teaching learning president of the local pta or pto principal of a county school serving the same grade level and um this is where we probably need an administrative procedure to spell this out but my thought would

103be it should be the same learning community it's a those are the folks who are going to judge the work based upon contemporary community standards and how do you define the community it's where you live and it's not intended to be something of a legal definition it's really more common sensible so i think we can we can understand that you live in one side of the county you're going to have a different a different experience than someone living somewhere else which is why we have different learning communities so my suggestion to jamie would be that when you're populating that maybe the community superintendent appoints a principal from some other from somewhere within that learning community so then this this means then that it's always going to be a book by book school by school situation

104and not a system-wide i'm sure sitting again when these books go under review it will always be a book by book school by school situation so the way this is written now yes now from a common sense perspective sometimes there may be a challenge to a book that's part of the curriculum and so you can't take it out of just one school and so again that was a conversation that jamie and i had before we started there's an administrative procedure from another district that bifurcates the consideration between school-based decision versus system-wide decision um let's let's take for instance um well let's say let's say there's there's a book that's part of the ela curriculum and you the entire curriculum for a quarter is built around that book well you can't very well take it out

105of just one school and you leave that school hanging or maybe you can i don't again hypotheticals are dangerous um but if it was the sort of thing where you were getting complaints in more than one area at some point you need to have a system-wide review and so i discussed with jamie that there's a mechanism in place we need to have mechanism in place where we do the system-wide review and i think you said that we sort of already you sort of already thought through that right a little bit right right now it's still at the school level though it originates at the building level okay so there's i've identified an administrative procedure from another district that i rather like that allows us to have a system-wide review where necessary but by and large

106i think these need to be school-based decisions with school communities thank you i'm trying to find on my phone that request for recent consideration but we'll get into that in a minute okay matt go ahead and then there's two people on this side and then we need to one okay this is going back quite a bit we are charged with we are decided we are looking at library books now well welcome to the committee however we're looking at a policy that and rewriting or suggest not rewriting so making suggestions on a policy that is not just library books it's anything other than a textbook so what falls under the instruction materials definition okay so so anything other than a textbook that's used to support the curriculum um or or rather the instruction making of the

107instructional process if you look starting in lines four through six uh such materials could include but aren't limited books magazines newspapers journals and audio video audio and web resources so so it could be anything that's being used in the classroom by the teacher as a supplemental material it could be a youtube video um it could also be a library book um which is set forth on the second page starting at line nine so this policy really looks at literally everything except textbooks including library material but in this day and age because we have access to so much digital media in the classroom it's a recognition that we really kind of need to look at everything together through the same limbs and there and there have been some questions brought to our attention about outside videos

108being used by teachers and whether they were appropriate or not so so it seemed tone deaf in the moment to look at library books but not also look at other materials i guess that is where um i feel like our time and our resources have been limited if we're making this and only having library books in mind it seems like a lot of work when we're actually supposed to be looking at a policy recommendation for several different things i would think the same criteria would work for all of them i mean the same obscenity the same i would think because it's really library books here but should y'all use the same christmas and chrome books as well well we've that's it chromebooks that's got we so that's a device that's not something that that's not

109necessarily an instructional material so so so let's imagine so well it's it's a device so let's imagine um a teacher has a is teaching a class and wants to use a youtube video um or a video from a third party website well that's not part of the curriculum per se but it's being used to supplement instruction to make the class more interesting in a particular point the same criteria apply here what's the educational purpose uh and that's defined by state standards so if it's consistent with state standards it's great and if it's not where exactly why exactly are you using it um and i can go on from there so so to me i understand what you're saying you're thinking library book library book library book but our policy isn't designed exclusively around the library

110book i think in the moment we've been concerned about library books because people have been brought the library book have brought library books to the public's attention but honestly some of the questions that we hear night at board meetings is about this video or about that link and is it appropriate to be used in in connection with um with the curriculum yeah and y'all heard i've been one of those voices and i've expressed that my kids have while in school doing work have accidentally come across things that are inappropriate that the filters don't catch um that's an i.t problem well this is this it to me it's a re it's a web resource so our kids have google chromebooks so they do googling and that's a web resource you know if we're going to make

111suggestions about policy this feels bigger than the language we're using and if i would like a lot more consideration taken into that because that that is a very much larger problem it is and it's a problem that we can't really get our arms around for a couple of reasons one um we don't there are there are further constitutional issues that implicate um filtering the web in their federal statutes that implicate that as well what we're talking about here isn't a child's access to the web while he or she is is in school we're talking about here in the section above is where a teacher is using a youtube video or a third party website as part of the instruction the classroom instruction then it needs to come forward with these standards well it just doesn't

112say youtube it says web resources and i'm not the lawyer here you are but that does seem i'm using youtube as an example okay but because i'm not because in this situation i'm not speaking in hypotheticals in this situation i'm thinking of a very specific scenario where someone went to youtube for instructional purposes and maybe it wasn't the best choice um okay my next question is a follow-up so uh mrs thurman i think in the last meeting you've made mention and i won't get the right verbiage but i think you said kind of the board sets the policies and then a administration implements it okay so if the librarians read the policy and they build a leadership team that writes a handbook around that and we only have three instances this year where that's been

113challenged and it's been taken care of then it sounds like they're following following the board policy pretty well and i'm really having a hard time understanding what the problem is within our school communities well i think this because a lot of parents did not know they know now they did not know um and a lot of parents had no idea there was a way to uh complain about the books in a form they had to fill out they they did not know this is this they just did not know this they know now because a lot of parents just trusted us as a board and i'm the one who ultimately the board is the one who has to take the brunt of this if there's ever a problem it comes to the board it doesn't

114come to the librarian it doesn't come to the administration it comes to the board so therefore this is why i'm very adamant that this gets fit because i do not fix because i do not want this to come to the board saying why did you not know this i want everybody to know this and i and you know you say that there's a lot of these books in their libraries and there are and there's certainly no way that i'm i can read them all i mean i have a full-time job as well plus being on the school board a lot of parents are just exactly like me they have three and four and five and six kids and they can't go read all the books they trust us and i want them to be able

115to trust me to know that we've done everything we can to make sure that they know what is going on in their school so that's why this has to be fixed this is our job this is a school board job and we've just asked the community help because it's just an overwhelming task as you can see because of the school board meeting if we discuss this as a school board meeting we'd be there for hours we're already there sometimes three to four hours and have been there absolutely we've been there early morning but anyway but they trust us and so the way i see it they they have reason not to trust us at this point because some of these books have made it into the library for their kids to get their hands on

116and they had no idea they were there and so i want somebody to be accountable and so far because i say everybody's like well you know we're following the policy well we thought we had a policy in place to keep some of this stuff out of our libraries and obviously either someone was misinterpreting the policy we're just trying to clarify it make sure that everybody understands and we want the public to i know that they can trust this board when these books are put on our library in our libraries that they can trust us to have done our due diligence to vet these books before they get there instead of everybody saying well you know we followed the policy well obviously the policy mark some of these books would not have been in our libraries

117okay let me interject because you said something i want to comment on it i think you're pop i think you're right the policy as written is pretty good policy i don't think it has been very clearly understood and i think it has lacked what i will call the balancing test for people to know that there's maybe an avenue to object to a book that might be offensive so i think a large measure of of what we need to do going forward is to push some of these complaints to the school community let the complaints work their way through the system because the board is is ill-equipped to have you know a book club meeting once a month and go through is this or is this not a good book some of the things that have

118been read to us have been very painful to sit in here but we can't judge the work as a whole um in the moment while we're sitting there if you understood contemporary language from shakespeare some of that some of that work is a little bit difficult um no one questions the value of shakespeare so that's where there needs to be a process where the where the works are vetted there's a record that's developed and quite frankly what what the board needs to do and you'll see this in 403 which i really hope we get to soon um it is what you'll see in there is complaints about these books and in other materials whether it's a youtube video or a website those get pushed now to the committee and those get get vetted there by

119the people who understand maybe it's the curriculum or maybe you understand the pedagogy or maybe you understand and then it comes to the board on the record um so i have a question about that so ms thurman you said that a lot of people now know parents are waking up they know and we've been meeting for a little over a month i think have we seen a humongous influx in people making complaints you know i don't i don't know i have no idea i'm not on that committee i didn't know that the the other uh request for reconsideration had been filed until it was brought to me we don't know that so i have no way of knowing i have no idea so if they have it's really immaterial to me the fact of the

120matter is i'm on the board i'm accountable and i want everybody else that underneath me with the superintendent and the people that work for him to be accountable as well somebody has to be accountable which was david's point all along somebody needs to be accountable because i'm ultimately going to be accountable for people under me not doing what the policy says and i want to know what the pro why why this is happening so it doesn't make any difference whether it's one or whether it's 10. or whether it's no it doesn't we need to fix this policy it makes a difference to me it makes a difference to me as well dr paris have you so if we have no complaints we don't need to fix the policy if it's not broken what are we

121fixing oh doctor i would be curious i have not personally received okay do we know does anyone know if we've seen a huge inflate we keep hearing that we need to fix it but no one has shown me how it's broken well just i think reading the book i can answer that question constitutionally you don't have a measure for what's offensive so so constitutionally the way the policies currently drafted for you to exclude a book would be kind of arbitrary there's no standard in the current policy so so is is the policy broken well sort of back at you delegation by what standard would someone decide this book is is not appropriate for for elementary students i can answer that where in the policy does it do this okay so like mrs thurman said they

122make policy and then staff implements it and it it's surprising to me that you all have not read the handbook because they have multiple levels of vetting a book as the handbook read the policy yes you might not understand why it's a proof but only three people have had a problem and now that they know we have not seen it there's a lot of people that have a problem they just haven't filled out over america okay okay let's go we're not going to go there we know it's a problem because it's a problem all over america so right now we're working on policy and if you don't want to work on fixing the policy you think it's not broken you you know you don't you don't have to approve i'm the one who has to

123vote on it some of the school boards have to vote on so you've given your ideas about what you think needs to be changed or not changed and that's fine that's why we're all here and it will be up to the board to make the decision whether the policy needs to be changed that's really not this committee's problem but i was sent here by this by the chair to get a committee together to give some options and some suggestions and that's what i'm going to do so you've given your suggestions or if you you haven't changed now that we've gotten some new information tonight i mean it changes because now we have it it's changed because we have new information to look at tonight i would like what new information well scott's new recommendations the

124letters in red well scott took uh compiled all of our our suggestions that we sent to him and did and and came up with this policy without mr bennett present before and i this is just for my own personal opinion being clear that you were going to take it and compile one document out of all of our recommendations was not how it i took it when you said um miss thurman that we would all put forth recommendations and they would all go to the board and they're and they're all going to go to the board this is just scots this is scott's skype that's just the missing piece of that piece of information what did you think we were going to do have a policy that was 10 miles long well i asked and i

125did not respond i asked what was going to happen with our recommendations they're going to go to the well they're going to the board today and it's also going to scott to give us some recommendations that we're going to look at tonight and we were not told that and that's what angela is saying we were not told attorney to be here and he is here yes but you are his recommendation to look at your recommendations to make a policy obviously you've never kathy have worked on policy this is the way it works you give recommendations she worked on policy as a school board member not as a community member that's different that's why i have a problem with us doing policy it should be we're not doing policies we were given recommendations like we always

126did kathy you did you were on the policy committee you you that's right you their board didn't write the policy they came to us you took them to scott and we approved them same exact thing we don't get recommendations from a group of citizens to go in well we should get well all policies should be for the citizens well i think we thought our recommendations would have went to the school board they are they're gonna go i think the miscommunication is that this would have gone from point a to point b then the board would have digested and came back to you know what the board would have done they'd have said scott here are the recommendations will you do a surprise that's the way it works okay so none of us are on the

127school board and we don't know that path of question so that's where i'd say it's very frustrating for a lot of us and not know all of those pieces of information you're assuming that we all know your day-to-day operations that aren't public that aren't processed and unless we've served on any of these boards we don't know your methods so i think that's just saying that there is a piece of frustration because maybe we needed to be talked step by step through that process and instead of an assumption so so i think the comments that y'all have been making all along and you're concerned that what you value in terms of what the policy should reflect access to information what does it mean to say community standards these are all considerations that that have resonated with

128me as i have been listening to what you all have had to say and and i'm kind of bound more by what the the supreme court has said so so i'm mindful of her concerns as a committee i'm also mindful of what i've heard at board meetings from parents i myself am a parent and i'm mindful of what the board members think and so my job really is to give the board a policy that allows them to reflect community values that's my job and and and so to to a point that you raised earlier this day i think that the policy is good i've tweaked it to provide what i would what i would call some constitutionally defensible standards you're you're right i haven't incorporated the library handbook but there's nothing in 402 that references

129the library handbook at least that i've seen right but though and so my point there is under the current under why are we here i think that the current policy needs to reflect what standard someone might use to say you know what this book is either not appropriate for elementary age kids may not be appropriate for high school age kids or maybe maybe we restrict it there's nothing in the policy right now that provides anybody with any clear guidance and so you're referencing the library handbook it's not coming from the front that hasn't come from the board right so we need a policy-based yardstick that empowers the administration to use its discretion that's what i'm saying i guess what the problem with one policy that lays that out is it doesn't take into account the

130different libraries that we have and who they service so my son is at a middle high school in middle school and he's going in where there are high school books and so what do we do with that because he can't we can't have two separate libraries at this school and we can't have two different ways of one way to do it so the librarians see okay we we know it needs to be age appropriate and we have different ways of leveling this up without putting grade levels on it they have different ways to do that and they explain to me why they don't want to do grade level labels because some kids don't read on grade level and don't want to be seen reading lower below so they've done the work and it's happening and

131the policy allows for the librarians to use their professionalism and their code of conduct to implement this and i i want to say they're implementing it well and they do have to vet books i sat with a librarian and she showed me how she had one library book that she had to put into the system and it took quite a while and it went through many steps many steps of appropriateness how it would be categorized and then put into the card catalog i don't know if that's really how you say it anymore but that's what i remember but it's it's working there some people might not like how it works but as a community we've only had three instances and i know parents now know but we're not seeing a huge influx of situations come

132up okay the fact of the matter is we're going to we're going to come up with a new policy on the school board so that's a move point anybody else it's going to make a point to me okay well it is for this committee when you write um sensitive you changed it sensitive to offensive so you're going to have to change that everywhere in the policy right possibly i saw that i i left it in there further down because i think so if you look at the second page um what was line 12 however there may be sensitive content contained in these books sensitive to me is a broader term than offensive offensive is a narrow range of things that we're going to look we're going to look at maybe removing but maybe not sensitive

133doesn't meet the standard for being offensive necessarily so maybe something is it's a sensitive topic um maybe it deals with um with teenage pregnancy maybe maybe it deals with um with equity issues maybe it deals with um with war those are all sensitive issues and so in this low in this in this towards the bottom of this there may be sensitive content contained in these books that's sort of an admonition to parents you know we're going to try to keep defensive stuff out but you know what there may be something sensitive and even as i articulated it verbally i realized that it's i maybe you need to find a different way to word it but but they're trying to capture a different thought that that you know the library is going to contain lots of

134ideas and we don't screen out ideas that we may disagree with necessarily does that make sense yes now so when you're trying to screen out books you're going to be sensitive to other people's cultures in the least also right that allow the policy allowed for that well we're not going to screen out that a committee is not supposed to be screening out things that are short of the offensive standard okay so someone's cultural beliefs religious beliefs whatever i i so so someone may someone may find a particular group's offense religious beliefs offensive well so if if it doesn't meet the criteria that we've set out here about um profane language graphic depiction depictions of violence or sex etc or or the like things of this of that similar nature then it's not offensive within the

135meaning of this policy you may disagree with the ideas contained in there but that doesn't mean then it comes out so i'll give i'll give it for instance there's there's been much discussion about critical race theory and whether we teach it whether we don't teach it whether whether books that advocate critical race theory whether they should be in the curriculum or not is decided by the general assembly they're not in the they're not in they're not there whether they should be used as instructional materials general assemblies decided that they can't be could you have a book that advocates critical race theory in the library or or would that be in violation of this policy that wouldn't be a violation of this policy because it's not offensive on the basis of profane language or or graphic

136depictions of violence or sex it's a different political idea and you know likewise if you had a book maybe in society in high school about um um surprised not economics now i'm really telling a little bit of my age um some may disagree with that but we don't screen ideas right this policy cannot be used to screen out an idea it it targets offensive content and offensive here is is is kind of narrow profane language graphic depictions of violence or sex or the like um and i say or the light because like my mind doesn't let me go to everything that there's there but the language like what is some cultures might it might be you know offensive in some cultures and not another so who decides so so that's uh if i understand what

137you're saying our friends um in a nearby district had this very this very debate um is is some profanity over the line is it beyond the pale and and they said yes in in you know some profanity is a step too far what is what is where's the line here that would be afraid for a review committee it would be up for when you're looking at the work is some profane you're asking me where the line is i don't know i can't tell you i can't tell you okay you almost got uh are we ready to move on then to four questions no questions okay um i think how many librarians are in here tonight have you all been asked to give your input into any of this discussion to me that's who we need

138to be talking to as our librarians whenever we did and whenever we reviewed policy when i was on the school board if it had to do with hr we dealt with hr if it had to do with library we should ask the input of the library but this is not just about librarians or kathy we have somebody from the administration right here that is uh is representing the librarians that's why he's here this is why then this is also about the public input this is not just about librarians obviously librarians thought some of the things that yeah that's right well we know how the books this is what we this is why we called jamie in to get him to tell us the process for the books getting in the library so that's the main

139thing we needed to know what i'm saying is that we could ask our librarians that question and they could well what why i ask all the librarians we this is why he's their representative like i'm representing the school board on this committee he's representing the librarians and that's why he was here for us to ask ask questions and this is more about how the books got into the library and the content of the books and so and this is why we're asking the community this is the community schools these are not my schools these are not jamie's schools these are not the librarian schools these schools belong to the taxpayers of this county and the parents we wanted their input and how they felt about some of the books in their library what they found

140offensive and that's why this committee's here one certain group of people no it was not no it absolutely was not kathy it is all over this country i don't know if you're paying attention or not it is from california to new york to texas the fact of the matter is we're here and if those of you that don't think it's necessary then you don't have to have any more input if your job here is done your job here is done that's fine and so do what i'm saying okay that's fine you can okay but if you think this is frivolous and that is there's no need for this then it's up to the board there's uh eight other board members for now that are going to be deciding this not just me so if if

141you don't if you don't want to have any more say then that's fine if you think your work here is done that's fine but right now we're going to move on to 4 403. so let me in interest of time let me just dive into the meat of the policy if you look at the second page um so one of and i and i understand what has been said at this point that it's only we've only had three complaints only three complaints um we don't know that we know that there have been three complaints that have gone through the formal process or at least the start of the full process we don't know how many people have gone straight to the board because quite frankly that's as as miss stern's pointed out the board is

142a final decision maker and and for whatever reason people have felt like that's where they need to go i don't i don't know if they haven't been aware of the policy i don't know if they attempted the policy and they i don't know what what i do know is um literally for hours we've been reviewing we've been listening to complaints about content that that should be better directed to review committees so that if necessary the board can then make an informed decision down the road after the after the work's been embedded and so the first thing that you'll see um at the very very top of this policy is not withstanding any other board policy no one will be allowed to address the board regarding the content of any book or other instructional material until

143the procedures of this policy have been exhausted i don't i don't know necessarily that that the majority of the board will agree with that but to me it's a good it's good housekeeping because when someone complains to the board about a work the board is ill-equipped in that moment to decide the value of a book that they haven't read and so at the end of their five minutes the most someone can do is say we'll have you let me get through this first um the most that someone can do is get to the um the other side of the five minutes and say well have you talked to your principal well no i didn't know i needed to do that and that hasn't been the dialogue but my point here is there's a process and

144i think that some that some of the work that the board can do in this process is to push these complaints down to the administration so that they are handled appropriately it may be that someone doesn't really have a problem with the book they have a problem with with maybe a comment that the teacher said i i don't i don't know i'm my point is there's a process we should honor the process okay but one of the one of the problems i have with this scott is like some of the books that were in that people filed papers about they said they stopped and i don't know if this was true or not that the process was stopped when it came to the board was that was i told that incorrectly i actually think you're

145right that was stopped okay i don't like that why was it stopped i don't know i don't know i don't know about that i can say though says the current policy says that if it bypasses the local school it is sent back to that so if you look at d for instance okay well this is uh this is why this is what i'm saying so it was stopped so they say that there haven't been but this many complaints about books i think you should be able to come to the board about anything scott i'm sorry i disagree with that because of trump if this had not been brought directly to the school board members we would not have known because by the time it went through this process and then they said well we were

146following the policy and the policy said we could have these books in there then it's over and then it's over and then we would have it would have never made it to the board at that particular time and we would have never been made aware of this so i i i'm going to tell you in my district if you're in district 1 you can come to me about anything and this is where we'll get through this this isn't intended to say you can't go to a board member i mean obviously they're your elected representatives you can refer to them about anything because during operational school this is more um if you're going to sit there if you're gonna if you're going to address the board and read the content of the book um i think

147it's fair to ask the question have you read this to the principal well in some cases scott it seems the librarians haven't read the book because they said they haven't read it in the book sometimes they say they haven't read the book and we won't know unless we push that back to the school to find out answer that question but i'll also say they again i hate to keep coming back to the the library handbook but there's criteria they use to look at those reviews of those books right so they were not randomly selected right can i also say i think part of this board policy if you look at c3 right is to bring it at the school level so the first really approach uh on uh 4.403 c3 really the the initial process

148of this is trying to work it out at the school level right so so you want it to be as close to the situation as you can before it reaches the board yeah i i i understand that but like i say if i did not come to the board first we would be having this discussion and i found we need those discussions happening at the school level right so so i think i think that one of the reasons that we have gotten where we are is a little bit of bad housekeeping i think that there was a school-based complaint about something and um but likewise someone wanted to address the board under our our appearance for the board policy which you have the right to do and so whether it was a good decision or

149bad decision but i think the previous administration decided well okay now that the board has this we're going to cut this off and we're not going to handle it at the school level anymore and i think that kind of became precedent and what i'm trying to do is fix that because i think that that those decisions do need to be pushed and to rhonda's point sorry to miss thurman's point um we do need input from the librarians about something because there i promise you i will ask y'all is let me get through i promise um the um we do need the input and this policy presupposes that there's been a school level vetting and for the last several months there just hasn't been we've kind of pre-tremended the process it's kind of our fault um

150but it's also in keeping with the rest of board policy where people can come to the board about virtually everything and the question that i think we need we the board need to ask you the board need to ask um is if it's being addressed for the first time in a board meeting is that the best place to hear it um so i this policy tries to get back in front of this and say you haven't talked to your to to your school and if they haven't then they come they couldn't come to the board they don't they can always come to you yeah they call you i'm i'm the one who had legacy they call you at work and you you you light them up and say hey you talk to your principal and

151if they have then by gosh the next thing you're going to tell them you need to talk to anyway that's just that's my suggestion and the board may not agree well i think some parents are so appalled when they saw some of the stuff that they said did you know this is in your library without going and saying excuse me i'd like to talk to you about this library because that's usually not the it's usually not when you're a paul that's usually not your first reaction i you won't still on page two if you look at line 11 number five and this is to your point sir um i've circled this key challenge materials available for use in review during the reconsideration process i've highlighted that because i think um i think maybe we should

152put something in there about the principal has discretion um rather than just saying absolute i mean i think the presumption is we don't take something out if it was appropriately included but i hear what you're saying and so i'll i'll i'll think about a way to tip the hat to there may be an extraordinary circumstance where maybe a book somehow gets in and we like oh my goodness reasonable minds can't disagree this book needs to come out so i mean i think that absolute language we need to need to address moving down to what war loans 19 and 20. i've taken out the board member and hcea representative simply because i think that part of the the review process it really does need to be at the school level um and also i think if

153the board is going to conduct them in my opinion the board may disagree and i it's totally up to the board i think if the board is going to conduct an independent review it's better for the board to be outside of those conversations those are my two cents now i know rhonda if they call you you're going to be part of the conversations and that's yours that's how you view your ethical obligation and i think that's right um hcea representative but then to the hca doesn't really represent the tasters anymore either exactly right so that they need to be gone yeah um further for the down under what is now seven all right revised 7b um it's a it's a nod of the cap to there has to be a yardstick that is used to

154measure the value of the material and so they consider the materials in light of the criteria set forth in board policy 4402 criteria for review of materials and i'll change the title of that to reflect some of the comments that we've had this evening let's see uh let's see and then the what is now uh 30 i guess um and this is one of these areas where jamie and i are going to talk about administrative procedures i think that we're gonna if there's a review committee that has a hearing on this there needs to be a good process minutes taken i mean not maybe not like prior written notice minutes but you know good then it's taken um and so my thought is if someone is dissatisfied from what the review committee does it comes

155to the board and so the board can either review the record and sustain the review committee or you can made a good decision we sustain it um or if you think you know what maybe maybe the review didn't make a good decision maybe they should have maybe they shouldn't have taken the book out or maybe they should have taken the book out the board can vote to grant a new hearing but but you can't just overrule the review committee um without having a hearing okay hearing like the hearings we have the board have a hearing or send it back to the committee for another hearing well i guess we could even send it back we could we could even do that well i mean is that what is that what you're saying about what i

156intended what i intended here was there would be a hearing on the book a hearing with the board just like we have here i've got an okay hearing and sitting yeah and so it would be like you know um so you know this day you know you you brought you brought forth some concerns about this work you know you you have the floor and so you know you've got 15 minutes to tell us your concerns it's just like we have a hearing okay so then maybe you ask you know someone who wants to defend you yeah yeah and then there's their deliberation about that yeah go ahead okay so going back to the review process i agree it needs to be at the school level because if you've got a great principle in my opinion

157you've got a great school um yep uh but in this situation that has come up since whatever june july some people in the community do not have students in the school system but they are concerned about the material in the schools because they're taxpayers so if if the review has to go through the school first dude is that going to be open to the public or does the parent because i do have a child that i have custody of in a school so i could do i could go through the library search all these books and i could do that tomorrow but what if my next door neighbor who's concerned about community standards wants to look on the library search engine and find pornography i don't know i mean what is her mechanism so you're

158asking what's standing does someone who lives in the community but is otherwise not connected to the public schools what standard so under this policy they wouldn't have any because they may not like it but they're not affected by it they're they're they're taxpayers but but generally speaking um just being a taxpayer doesn't give someone standing to challenge something that's this specific okay angela hi how was it kind of to the point of what she brought up when you were talking about it came before the board they should probably recommend that they go through the policy process i think a question i had asked earlier at one of our other meetings to jamie dr paris was that the requests that were filed this year were not filed by parents of students so it stopped that process

159there and then uh some of those folks came before the board and so that's kind of how a lot of that's not all or i'm not speaking for how rhonda collected her information but that's how similar i told you okay i didn't i just said that wasn't how all of it no you said i'm not sure how she i've collected that i said i told you how but i that was a question i had asked was you know like why didn't that process carry on and it wasn't at that point wasn't what wasn't the board that jumped on at that time um but it was that there was no more process for the what office is that dr paris i'm not sure exactly what handles that but they couldn't carry it any further because a

160principal hadn't submitted it it wasn't brought forth through the school so the process kind of stopped and so that was my question and i think she kind of answered it was you know if they go to the board and then they kick them back out what was their next step um if it's not coming through librarian principal upscale but i think you were asking something earlier as to like you didn't know what happened to the few that had come into review they had been and he could attest to that that they were submitted by people that weren't parents of students in our district yeah but they've been there have been other things i think scott knows some of the ones that were stopped by the previous administration i think that's what he was talking about

161that some things were when it came to the board they immediately stopped that's it's not just those things there were other things as well okay thank you oh you were nice when okay so you have the book and it goes through the process and so they said well we're going to keep this book even though people are appalled by it or whatever um are you going to put like a statement out like where other people or other schools can see why the book was kept and stuff like that so that the next person maybe isn't so appalled that they get it so is there going to be any way to track like that like why one was kept or why one was rejected so you're asking an administrative procedures question but but the policy envisions

162something like that so now we go back to 4402 in the event the administration or the board determines that a work is offensive but nevertheless offers literary value the steps will be taken to advise parents or guardians when their students have access any such material and of course we can change that to advise parents or guardians that such material is being used i i'll i'll i'll think about that but i'm sorry i was looking through the person um so yes i think if we go through a process and what we're so let's let's take uh let's take a work huck then eventually the adventures will help very fast um there's some language in there that some people find very objectionable but the way mark twain uses it um is actually he's actually fighting for for

163racial justice and so he asked the question okay is this work taken as a whole a great literary value despite the offensive language and so i think maybe in that scenario particularly if someone was going to if um if it were being used in the curriculum there might be a note home be advised that inventions of huckleberry finn will be will be used as a supplemental material blah blah blah there is some language in this work that some people may find offensive however as a whole this work is a great literary value and teaches the values of x y and z um that's sort of what i envisioned the administration would do to alert people but will there be a like a catalog of this this event have so that the next school doesn't have

164to like they can have like their their points can be met like that everybody's on the same page i don't see why not but that's an administrative question now now also be aware that that the way this policy is drafted you could have two schools that reach different conclusions based upon the input of the community i think that would be infrequent but it can happen i mean again when we're talking about community we don't we don't live in complete isolation from one another um but we have to allow that that rock point could reach one decision and midtown can reach another on the same work that's possible and we have to respect that process so the fact that midtown reaches a decision isn't necessarily precedent for another learning community but there would there would be

165a written record of that decision rationale that they could still look at right exactly okay i had a few questions um first question so we're changing this the review committee so on line 12 in 4.403 from five people to three people that was a question of mine as well so now we just have the executive director or director of teaching and learning which is basically dr parris so that's not a school level person we have the president of the pta or pto so that's you know a parent representative and then the principal of a county school serving the same grade level so that's a different school than the complaint was made so i don't see where there's very much local school input on this review committee and i find that concerning well it would be

166it would still be the same learning community as we discussed um and we could just as easily add a couple more people to that i mean this is there's a reason we do first drafts yeah um we ask for our input so that's some input and i appreciate that yeah so you know one of the things that that i sort of kind of imagine um if you look above when a complaint is about the principal and the teacher will review the validity of and so i sort of assume that they are being part of the process because can you make that more explicit i think that'd be helpful yeah i can't i can't um the fact that i assumed it doesn't mean that a principal implementing this is going to necessarily need to do that

167by default so yeah i think certainly that they would be part of it um and you know we could even include well i'll i'll talk with dr about about maybe expanding that to include a little bit more representation but but one of the reasons that i think um and again i was working from the existing policy if you look at a board member in hcea rep i don't know that hcea rep is necessarily a great choice because that person might be a science teacher or a math teacher um so when i took it out i didn't readily think of a replacement so thank you for your comment the the only other comment that i would add is you've said several times that you didn't feel like the policy as written had very clear guidelines um

168and that's why you wanted to tie it to the the list kind of the bullet points in 4.402 yes ma'am but as i read it i mean there's pretty clear steps in seven d e and f or really a so there they read the material in its entirety they determine the extent to which it supports the curriculum they judge the material for its strengths values objectionable content and then they present a decision in writing so that's a pretty clear process to me i don't know that we need to tie it to all these bullet points and kind of we're bringing now a lot of a lot of other considerations um into the mix and especially this new the new bullet point eight that you added the extent to which it may be considered offensive to

169the community standards so one of the cases where the district was found to have censored content all they did was what's listed here and because they didn't have was listed in the other policy they were found to have violated the first amendment so andrew is that a district court case no it's a sixth circuit okay would you mind sharing that with the german group okay okay andrew we're going to wrap it up right the line right here it be with the president of cto or pta um could we have something in there that offers an alternative because we do have schools that do not have a pto or pta so that way we have an alternative line for those schools that are um president pta pto or other parent representative appointed by the principal okay

170okay so i will give i will submit a summary of our committee meetings to the school board on next thursday i will give them all the committee recommendations along with uh scott's work here after he works on it a little more do we get to see that summary first do what the summary that you're going to write for the board do we get to see that first well uh no no the one that i'm gonna write and give well i'd if i can get it together if i'm like you meg i wouldn't get it to you till the night before the board meeting but i will die i was waiting on the response from your questions before i wrote that so that's why i had to wait until last minute because i never got them

171from you actually you're a little late but that's okay we'll talk about that later but anyway i will um get the report to you if i get it together if yeah i will do my best to do that i will work with sherry sherry has a lot of the information and uh wait i'll hear back from scott and then we will i will submit my uh findings and i will give it to the board and then the board will take it from there so can i clarify one thing on the considerate like it's staying on consideration it's it's under review the committee may find it was fine right so i think that is is that the intent of why it stays in circulation right because it's really being investigated it's not been determined yet that's

172right okay is this like the policy that mr bennett your final product rhonda is it being presented at the meeting the next school board meeting so would it be included in the agenda that would be posted the friday before weeks of the deadline it's already passed so i don't know and what you need to understand if she's not submitting a policy she will be doing a report on the committee that would not vote on a policy thursday night he said that they possibly could earlier so no he said they could possibly he said we could vote on on a first reading honestly he didn't say it would be this way it may not be for three months to we will not be voting on this policy okay guys we we present it to the board

173the board may like the way it looks and say you know next board meeting we'll we'll vote on and ask for a work session uh they may ask for a work session to talk about it they may forward it to the policy committee i don't i don't know it's impossible to say when it will be voted on but it will not be next thursday okay thank you is this committee disassembled now and yes thank you thank you everyone for your commitment i appreciate it [Music]