School Board Book Review Committee Meeting 2/8/22

001[Music] so [Music] now so thank you [Music] please yeah thank you so oh hmm okay um and one of them so that you have a problem is and then okay if you don't mind find a seat at the table at one of the tables please you can sit right here if you want to so i'm like what is your name taylor hargrove okay how's it going [Music] um okay i think we're going to go ahead and get started i guess everybody's here we're going to try to do this as quickly as we can i know everybody's time is is valuable and i do appreciate everyone being willing to serve on this committee um [Music] the first thing i think we're going to do is go around and well i guess we'll just go in order

002i know one of my designees is not here tonight his son's in a championship basketball game which i can understand i was there last night with my grandson so um nancy we're going to start with you we'll start with district one and we'll go to district two district table let's do it in that order just to introduce yourselves okay nancy patty from district one okay who's district two meg day from district two okay nicole gulotta district three kristen killingsworth district three paula wilson district four uh james mckissick district five angela favaloro district five flynn hunter district six jay price district seven and also david kelman from district seven thank you kelsey anderson district eight taylor hart grove district eight loretta lowe district 9 okay so every district has someone here good kathy how are you

003i'm good how are you okay everybody needs to get their microphones like they say this is live stream and so everyone needs to get their microphone where uh when you speak you speak into it so they can so you can be heard um okay like i said i do appreciate everyone hoping not to take too i hope we don't have to have too many meetings i'm just tonight's just going to be mostly an informational and organizational type meeting because i need your input about how you think would be the best way to proceed uh with the information that we have and what we're trying to accomplish on this committee the purpose of this committee is to review the hcde policies pertaining to the selection of books at our libraries and other reading material placed in

004our school by outside organizations after the board was made aware of books of concern in our libraries it was evident that the board policies pertained to library book selection needed to be reviewed to ensure the same standard for selection is used across the district we also want to be sure that the policy reflects the community's our community standards after our commission committee finishes its work i will submit our findings and suggestions to the board the board will take any recommendations from this committee under their review for consideration that's our that's the plan we we don't make policy the school board is on people who make policies we're going to take what we find to them and then we will we will move on from there as a board um this is just going to be

005an informational organizational meeting i not only want to be for it to be informational for this committee i also want to be informational to the public for this reason i have asked that these meetings be live streamed i would also like to have all information in this packet as well as other information that we presented to this committee put on the school website for everyone to be able to see of course we've all introduced ourselves i want to introduce you to sherry are you back here sherry ford she's the one who will kind of be your contact person if you really you can either go contact me or you can contact sherry whichever one of us if you need some information but she's probably the one you've been communicating with so and i'm right up

006front i want to tell you some of this material to me usually you don't get discussed and um mixed company i'm not real not real even though i'm pretty much willing to discuss almost anything some of these things are just even a little hard for me to discuss some of the things in in some of these books but i do want to apologize for that right up front some of this language i don't use in my everyday life we're not allowed to be used in our home i feel like james dobson did when he said that he served on a pornographic committee one time he said i didn't want to do that because now those those images are in my head and i just don't like that and i feel that way about some of

007the things that i've read in some books and it's it uh it just is very disturbing to me but anyway uh i'm going to go over this packet of material and tell you what it is it's what some of these things are you may be able to use them as we go through and review some of the books the first thing that i wanted everybody to do is to see the the policies that we have um regarding material and our libraries and also material that have been placed in our schools so we are not reviewing any kind of material that has to do with curriculum that's not what this committee is for that's if we may do another committee at some time someone else may do another committee i don't know to reduce some curriculum

008but that's not what we're here for this is just strictly for books that are in the library and uh supplemental material that's been put into our classrooms and also some outside material that are brought in from outside groups that have not been vetted by anyone we don't really even know what they are and so so we have policies and uh some of the policies may not be clear we may need to beef up some of these policies to kind of accomplish i guess a goal to ensure that some of these books do not get under the shelf if we agree that these some of these books do not meet up to community standards and i think after some of the parents see this they will probably agree as well so anyway if you will look

009through here some of these things have been highlighted just to show you um like for instance the selection of instructional material other than textbooks if you go on down it mentions says the director of schools it's on line 25. the director of schools or designee will establish administrative procedure for review and selection of materials subject to this policy particular attention will be paid to addressing the suitability of instructional materials that include content which might be considered sensitive by parents or students for example materials that contain course language graphic violence explicit sexual content illegal use of drugs or alcohol so there's one policy that mentions coarse language there another one writes in responsibility it says each student has the responsibility to on line 18 it says reach train from libel slanderous remarks and obscenity and verbal

010and written expression another one addressing the advertising and distribution of materials in the schools it says the principal shall screen all materials prior to distribution to ensure their appropriateness the principal may prohibit materials that and line 22 says are obscene lewd are sexually explicit there's a few of those and this one right here sherry's not marked and i forgot which this one right here uh that's just that's just the reconciliation okay i'll see okay that's the one okay now i will go over that in a minute so also our uh code of acceptable behavior is the one that says digital's it has digital citizenship statement on it but really we're looking at the code of conduct for students and in there it says students are not to use obscene profane threatening or disrespectful language or

011images and any communications with hcs faculty and staff these actions are prohibited as indicated in the code of acceptable behavior the code of acceptable behavior for those that don't know is online and you can look at it and it tells for every infraction what the punishment will be it's quite lengthy so i just ran off some of these pages it says students must use the email address and profile pictures as appropriate for educational environment email addresses that use profanity or otherwise may be construed as offensive shall not be permitted in correspondence with hcs faculty and staff then you go on over to the next page again it mentions students are not to use obscene profane threatening or disrespectful language or images and any communications with hgs students these actions are prohibited as indicated in the

012code of acceptable behavior okay now when i started talking about having this committee i was told it was a violation of first amendment rights i've heard all kinds of of issues first amendment rights do not mean you can say anything anytime you want especially to children as we speak the tennessee is looking is looking at some new legislation involving obscenity for minors uh being used with minors and sherry i know it's here i know i don't have a mark that doesn't handle okay now this is the new legislation that they're looking at at the state it has not been passed yet but it probably will be so um these are laws regarding obscenities and uh sexual conduct and those uh it says a material is harmful to minors it's something i think we also need

013to be cognizant of you can look that look at that and put your on and see if the material that we're going to be looking at is is going to meet up made up to this standard also uh for those that think that you can say anything you want any time you want we all know that's not true for instance every school board meeting when you speak to the school board you are a delegate they read a statement of what you can say and what you can't say and it says it says please do not present complaints or concerns you have about an individual employee of the school system if you wish to voice those complaints and concerns you should contact the central office for a meeting with the superintendent it goes on and on

014and on and so even the school board even we limit what you can say and so for those that think we can't limit what can be said to students i think you're wrong i think that is exactly our job as parents and school board members to know what is being put out there for our students and like i say this is mostly informational and a lot of parents don't know this because i as a school board member didn't know it until moms for liberty uh read uh some excerpts and gave us the school board some excerpts from some books some of these books and these are just some books of concern that i made a list of these are books of concern that have been brought to my attention i don't know what age group

015these are some of them i have read some of them i have not i think this board needs to decide uh first of all you need to understand the process by which these books are placed in our libraries and the process by which outside groups are allowed to put books into our classroom that are not vetted by anyone we need to fix the policy to address that because one of our policies now and if you look at the very bottom of one of the policies i think it's something that needs to really be looked at and i guess we have so many policies our policy book is what almost 500 pages long it's it's really long and at the bottom it says 4.402 the last paragraph i think he got put in there and it's

016one of those policies is that kathy lyndon will knows we went through policies for months and months and months literally and i don't know how this quite got by without raising a red flag with me but it says in the online nine of page two of 4.402 it says parental disclosure and prior notice does not include include books located in the school library or classroom there that are intended to provide optional reading material on each student's individual reading level these books will continually be monitored however there may be sensitive content contained in these books that was not previously reviewed by school personnel that is problem that is a problem for me that we have handing out kids to let kids read books that nobody has looked at if we just let them have them uh

017parents should alert the administration about any sensitive contact that is found in these optional materials administration will then undertake the reconsideration process as outlined in policy 4.403 i have a problem with that part of that policy and i think that that's maybe how some of these things have because this one was uh updated in 12 13 18 is when that in each one of these policies have a date on them and they were and they were approved um so the the option the uh the way that you have to and this is what i i've said if we take care of these things on the front part we probably won't have so many uh parents filing um letters to recon request to reconsider forms if we take care of this on the front end and

018they're not put there to begin with uh then we won't have to to worry about a lot of that i did write and you do have the email in there i did write uh dr uh towns when she was here and i asked her i said uh i would like to know how books with inappropriate words even gd wind up in the libraries in our reading list who is responsible for vetting these books i found out that the school board didn't even really know the process by which books were placed into the library i just assumed maybe that all high schools had the same books maybe they were sent you know a list of books these are the books you're going to get i don't know i just guess i just never really gave it

019a lot of thought i didn't realize that librarians and there's some librarians here i think you're a librarian um i talked to about four librarians myself this week and uh found out the way that they selected their books and it was all over the map you know it doesn't seem they they could pretty much uh put in the library what they wanted so you can see if you get different personalities different backgrounds different i think we need a standard by which all these books are measured instead of everybody just kind of doing what they want and that's one thing i hope to maybe set forth in a policy that's a little bit uh i guess kind of adheres a little bit more to our community standard than some of the reading material that's out there

020but nakia does lay out in this did lay out in this answer to me the way the uh the process and so it's written there so you can you can look over the process uh about how they're chosen i know i see blake freeman over there and i know he was on his name is mentioned in here about wanting some of the people and maybe if we need a little bit more clarification about exactly how close they look at the library books or if the librarian's just allowed to do what they want to i'm not real sure how that works but i did have a librarian that said that she had when she got into the library that she took a lot of the books off of her shelf that were on there when she

021got there because she felt like they were inappropriate for the grade level that that that she had and she gave them to another school for their high school library because she just didn't think they were appropriate for the elementary school where she was teaching so um i guess it's just there's there's just a lot of autonomy for a for a librarian to have i think to just do what they feel like that they want to do i think we need to have a little bit more um say about about what's in the libraries so okay wayne uh yes sorry yes the school board does it we go over them we have our attorney there we go over them and kathy was head of the policy committee and we went over hundreds we have to buy

022well we have to review them is there a time limit every time timeline for each for each policy like they have some of them have to be reviewed every two years some of them every five years some of them you know and some of their hours haven't been reviewed in years and years and we got them up to date i think we've done them all by this at this point in the lat in the time frame but still because i don't know how this one got got really past me because we do go over them at school board meetings and of course some of them some nights we were doing 25 at a time so uh it was a you know a little bit and i don't remember that i don't know if we added

023that in 18 or if that was it has always been there i'm just not real sure i'd have to go back and look at the old policy before it was revised i really don't know but they're simple enough to fix the school board just has to vote on it you know we just fix it and move on so that's what i need to know from this committee how we need to fix this also we have like i say we do have outside groups that have put reading rooms and 15 i think they told us 15 of our schools and um they're putting books in there that no one has vetted we don't there's not a list of those books we don't know um hi i'm angela i'm here representing district five but i'm also an

024advocate and volunteer with a group that you're referencing monster social justice right and um i would like to clarify that we did work with the um opportunity zone office at the time those books were listed we've actually been very very transparent about this we had organizations we had grants we had to submit all the books that we donated many of the books that we donated were just an extension of the school library they were actually duplicates or just renewed copies that were donated and they were not curated by our organization we work for local bookstores librarians and literacy coaches and experts to curate that list so it was not just an adultered book shelving okay it was just a pleasure did you just go through the principle at your school or did it did though

025it went through the um administration at the uh district level so that they did so they did review the books that are in the in your readings yes they were the lists that were supplied i can't say what they did once they received those lists i can't speak for them but those okay so that list is available um i can supply the list i'm not sure okay do you have about the list of all four i don't have it with me right okay well i know but i would encourage you to give your contact information for organizations so you can reach out and get all the information that you need for clarification okay so for all 15 we they have a list of all the books correct i think we have all the books that

026were purchased through the grant that could be in various there were different age groups different it was multifaceted so that would be great i would love to see that list thank you very much hi mrs berman yes so are we just looking at library books you mentioned books and classrooms because i know that's like two different tigers two or two different animals i think is how it goes so are we just looking at library books uh mainly well and i say that because i have been made aware that there are teachers who have by their own admission i have said that they have um because they posted in chat rooms and things like that that they have are running libraries out of their rooms for restricted books that parents have to sign for but yet

027they're doing they're they are letting kids check these books out and they say they have a waiting list with the parent parent permission they're allowed and i'm wondering if uh and then also i did have a student that said that she let people have books out of her locker in her at school for books that were restricted or been banned other places so i'm just not real sure you know and people can do whatever they want to on their own time i'm just wondering if if that is in our school i can say i don't know and the attorney's not here um exactly how far we're going to go yet yeah or just not really i'm just not really sure because i because all of this was news to me i had i had no

028idea that a lot of this a lot of these things were in the in the classroom i'm not saying it's good i'm not saying it's bad i just i just didn't know so and then my next question is um i as well met with a couple librarians and they went through the hamilton county library handbook with me which is one of the most impressive things i've seen our district put out and it says that there's two places students can go to read online books one is the hamilton county library and then one is another place and i cannot remember off the top of my head sora thank you okay are we going to look at what's online there as well or just that's a great idea that's the reason we hate this committee that's a

029good idea okay yeah okay yeah and um oh i'm sorry i should say i just can't see them so what's up here right now is a public access catalog yes one of the things that you mentioned is wanting the list of all of the books that were on any shelves in the libraries is that not already no no i'm talking i'm not talking about in our library i know this okay i was talking about the books that were placed by outside organizations into our classroom into the classroom so we're not discussing what is on school library shelves this is about what is in individual classrooms online class talking about library books and and those books as well all reading material that's in the lot except the curriculum we're not getting into the curriculum yes that's

030exactly what this is you can go on uh where's the website there uh because i get it okay yeah library.hcde.org you can go on there you can click on a school and you can search their library library catalogs there so that would be a good that would be a good resource for you i think uh miss thurman since we've seem to have opened up the discussion a little bit about the scope of what will be reporting back to the board and i understand of course that uh you know obviously the board is the policy making body and we're providing recommendations and you guys can decide what you do don't use and in fact that's your job you guys were elected um i would suggest as we're starting to get into the scope we think about

031like you said there's the the um there's the balance between autonomy and central office staff and i would suggest that any policy that we put together we we do have to remember possibly stating the obvious that the teachers and librarians are of course you know licensed professionals we have only so many people in the central office and whatever we can do to provide guidance in our whatever we suggest you all guidance to the professionals so they know how they are expected to make decisions will go a long way as opposed to like you said there is a process right now to after the fact fix things well let's say that we do decide somebody decides after the fact that they don't like this book it doesn't seem to have been chosen or another librarian comes

032in and realizes that book doesn't seem age appropriate it would be good to have some documentation from the original professional who let that book in to explain you know why they chose it and it may turn out that there's something in the book that they felt had merit to it or it may turn out that nobody ever vetted that book so that's just my suggestion for as we think about the scope is we bear in mind um who will be using this in the end in the policy okay thank you okay oh go ahead james yeah um so i had a couple of questions um one was will we be getting copies of all these books so that we can read them and um you know discuss them not pages that are taken out of

033context um i think you know we would want to have a full picture of the book and like my brother here said you know also talk to some of the librarian school professionals um so that they can place that in context as well in the curriculum in the lived lives of students and their communities my other comment is [Music] just looking around and i've heard a couple of times people say or you say community standards community standards my question is is this committee reflective of the demographics of our school system is that yes or no and then if it is not then how will we how will we come to any community standard when so much of our community is not at this table well we let everyone pick two people i don't know who

034you are i don't know what you do i really don't care uh that's why we tried to get as diverse as the group as we could get everybody choose their own there was we didn't say you can't choose this kind of person or that kind of person or this person or whatever we just said choose two people and we're and we're pretty diverse on the school board so i figured that you know this committee would probably be reflective of of the community you know so i you know like i say since i don't know anybody's background except for nancy and a few of you others i know but other than that and i know kathy of course and some of the rest of you know this is their few yes um that's one of the

035reasons why i have a question on the policy because i think if you have clear policy in there no matter the demographics if it's followed then that will represent the entire district as a whole yeah um one of the questions too and i i believe it was angela mentioned the supplemental books that were installed into the library did they follow that same standard as far as them being installed into the library i know you said that you handed them over but uh do you know if the principal or the board that you submitted it to follow the same standard that was currently in place for the standard library books i mean i know you're asking this question right now but if this is a full discussion about our one organization one community partner and what

036we've donated to the books then we can set a separate meeting for our organization to discuss that i don't have all that material with me i came here as a representative of district 5. there are plenty of community organizations lots of teachers everybody who have donated many many many books most of the books that all of your educators have in the classroom are not paid for by stakeholders they are donated from the wonderful citizens in our community so that's a separate conversation on our own i understand and totally get the concern and wanting to have that knowledge and wanting to protect your children i think that is a consensus amongst most parents we want to do what's best for our children um when it boils down to what's best for our child versus what's best

037for our neighbor's child we have different we're mecca we have multiple faiths we have different cultures speaking to james's comment what's at the table is definitely not representative of chattanooga and i would encourage that we could remedy that in some form or fashion we could alter our plan but to carry on further on that i did have a question he was asking about if we could receive books um i know some things about obscenity and how it doesn't apply to the first amendment and some things like that one thing that the supreme court had a hard time defining obscenity and they use something called the miller test right and it has three parts i think that if we were to become some form of authority on obscenity which i'm not sure that i want to

038be the authority on obscenity since we have nine justices who struggle with that and i know that i'm way below that pay grade but considering you know whether the average person in our in our representative community here finds the work taken as a whole negatively whether the work depicts or describes in a patently offensive way sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law and whether the work has taken as a whole lacks serious literary artistic political or scientific value and i think some of the ones that have called into question have incredible literary artistic political or scientific value and that's why they have won the awards and why they're there that's my personal take and why i think that that's such a consideration before we would just remove something when we all have the

039option on these we sorry this thing picks up everything um we all on these optional reading materials we can say no as parents at any point we all have remind um and 24 other apps and power school and everything else that we can reach out to our teachers i don't know when people quit talking to your teachers and your principals i can tell my teacher at the same time that's what we're doing i know but at any point i had my child who was sensitive to horror books and scary stories in third grade i had no problem calling up my hamilton county teacher not calling emailing and saying hey i know that this is a great book for some but when my child goes to the shelf do you think we could steer them a

040different way and it was no problem my child didn't come home with the books anymore and we could even implement that into power school so it's discreet and not embarrassing to these other kids just like we did with other policies in the last year we can add something to powerschool it says hey i would like for my child to steer clear of these certain things just like they use powerschool for all these other things hi um librarian representative for hamilton county um there's a real simple fix to that um i don't have access to power school and so um what i do have access to is our library program and i can i could walk over if this board would let me but i can easily show you how you can put a message on

041any child's account and so i could go in under my own child pull up his name and right beside it when he goes to check out there's a red box that comes up and you just say you know please steer them away from object objectionable content um i've not had that happen in my 19 years as a hamilton county librarian but i've also only been in elementary school and i understand that the majority of these books are not elementary level reading but um that is a super easy fix that we could put into anything and um i could do a one minute video to show all the librarians how to do it and that'd be a quick tip good information thank you very much appreciate that kathy thank you um i think an opt-out policy

042would be exceptional and knowing that you have the access to do that and that you have the willingness to share that with other librarians to me would be an easy thing to implement into a policy rhonda that the one and that this the reconsideration of instruction or materials i mean i don't see why that could not just slide right in there and we could have an opt-out policy for all parents that if they do not want their child to read a certain book that's their choice but i don't want i don't think that it's fair to not to totally remove the book just because one or two parents don't want to have the child that look red now the question about having the materials in the classroom i do think that possibly that we could

043uh you might even have some suggestions of that i don't know how i as as a teacher for over 25 years i also kept books in my classroom because i always wanted my students to read so if there was ever a down time i they'd go get a book um so i don't want to do away with teachers having books in their library it's crucial because that's not what i'm talking about i mean this teacher was ex was ex she really was just wanting to do the restricted and the banned books for them to check out i mean she was just kind of bragging about it so that's i think i think that was the issue uh you know if you can't get it in the library then you can come to my class and

044i'll give it to you kind of thing it's not i mean i've donated a lot of books to my my kids library as well so i understand that but i don't think that's that's the kind of thing that i'm i'm talking about i'm talking about and then i'll be on the news tomorrow ron wants to ban all teacher books i mean you know i know how that goes but that's not the case i assure you but anyway okay talking about community standards i think just to lay it out easily is i don't think there's anybody in any community that would approve of playboy magazine being put on the shelf at school okay i don't think anybody here wants that right so what's the difference in these explicit images that are laying on the shelves in

045the schools in some of these books that we're talking about and playboy magazine not burning books i'm not talking about bernie books i'm not talking about banning books i'm talking about appropriate literature there's a billion books out there that are appropriate literature to be in school on school shelves in libraries and in classrooms the school shelves is not a place for these vile books to be if you want your children why would we have to opt in opt-out most of us never even knew these books existed in the schools until recently we all agree on that i'm pretty sure i know rhonda said she's she wasn't aware of all this stuff i wasn't aware of all this stuff so these parents that are not aware why they have to go opt in opt-out you know

046all this other stuff if you want your children to be exposed to this literature go buy the books go rent the books from the public library but don't lay it on the shelf for a third grader to accidentally pick up one of these books and go to seeing sexual activity period i mean it's it's just not appropriate for schools that's my that i don't think that anybody in this room could say it is okay so we were talking about can there are some things that are just i think common decency whether it's you call it common you call it community standards what i call it but common decency like i said one reason i wanted some of these books out here just to give you some idea and these just two just happen to be

047the authors because these are two that have been uh already um i guess put in for um to be reconsidered and so these were two that already had somebody like i say some parents from had already sent in to have have reviewed mr thurman may i ask i'm sorry i don't mean to interrupt is the purpose of our gathering here tonight to kind of outline the scope of our committee's work uh yes okay so um no i'm just i i'm i don't want us to get too in the weeds okay okay specific this is a specific book okay because i don't i want people to understand what we're talking about what we've i hope okay no i know i want your people are watching people are watching and i want them they do not see

048what we're seeing here and i want them to understand and like i say this reason i want it on our website i want them to see the language and people say well you know but take it out of context well the f word on a page of a book about 10 times i think it will not meet up to hardly anybody's community standards and i want people to understand what we're talking about and and some of these uh some of these about sex and you know shooting people blowing their brains out uh things like that a lot of parents don't realize things these are in this book this is why i just did these two well actually there's maybe there's maybe three there's three yeah because there's another one that was given was sent to

049uh sent to me last week and uh this uh pretty explicit i think you would say uh i just want people to understand that i'm not just talking about a few you know just simple cuss words you know one one lady said well you know the word ass is around there i'm not talking about that i'm talking about gd i'm talking about mf i'm talking about the f word ad nauseam uh talking about some really sexually explicit uh encounters uh those are the things that i i'm talking about and whether you're taking them out of context or what i don't know how you can take that out of context really um because i don't can't think of any time that that should be in a child's book that's just me like i said we'll let

050the community decide their tax money's paying for this so we we will see so mr thurman so what i want to do is now that you have this information i want you to figure out how we're going to move forward on this i don't know whether we're going to divide up into um [Music] to do like do elementary middle and high i don't know if that's the best way to tackle this um and you ask about getting copies of the book i don't have a copies of all of these books most of them are online uh if you want to look at them uh they're there because i don't know which books you want to look at i'm not here to say these are the books we're going to look at that's not why i'm

051here i want you if if parents have books that are listening if they have books they would like for the committee to look at maybe we can you can divide those up and look at them that's what i had the committee here like i said it's organizational meeting to see how we're going to move forward on this what do you think is the best way to move forward i i think a great way to move forward is to read the library and handbook i felt like earlier you said that there's no policy in place of how books get on the shelves in the library and there is not a policy but there is a handbook that's been updated based on the hamilton county policy that you were talking about and it's quoted in there especially

052you gotta put that little tape around the spine of the book so you know where it goes on the shelf and then it has to go through anyways it's laid out in here and then the reconsideration steps are probably the most robust process i've seen of how books are reconsidered and i i've it's in here for a robust group to look at um and this is like angela said far above my pay grade um again very impressed with the librarian handbook and how the reconsideration process works but i would say if we're going to look at library books the next step would be to read the librarian handbook and see if we think it's at fault because it's yeah it where's the youtube is that where y'all everyone read the librarian handbook it's excellent they've

053done a great job well i have actually looked at the librarian handbook and my question was this if the librarian handbook is so clear how did these books end up there that was my question if it was so clear and everybody knew exactly what it meant what it said how did how did they how did these books get through the cracks i mean well seriously 40 of these books um as a librarian so first of all let me give you my background um i have a master's degree we all have master's degrees in order to be librarians and um we were trained in um so i have a library with 11 000 books and i have an elementary library and there a lot of them are picture books but i can safely say i have

054not read every single library book in my library because i teach six classes a day and i have 30 minutes to do everything else and i have a family out so um i can't possibly do that so what i do is i rely on the resources i have at hand that i was taught to use in library school i went to the university of tennessee it's ala certified there are only like 50 ala certified schools in in the country so i feel very confident in my education but in doing so just like in the library and handbook that meg referenced and i have copies that anyone is interested it could put you to sleep too so i'm sorry but um part of it is that we read reviews in order to pick books and so

055a lot of these books have have have higher reviews and we can only i i don't have a way to take a book and um read it before i purchase it it's just not how book vendors work right now and so i have to go off of the the resources i have at hand one of which is teaching books which dr parker pays for us to have which is also a teaching resource and so i read those reviews and then i say okay does this sound right for my population i'm in an upper middle class school i recognize that what my kids are interested in is not what my kids at my urban school that i taught at would necessarily be interested in and so i have to just take that information and do the

056best i can with it do things slip through the cracks a thousand percent but i also know that i can look and say okay this book says it's good for third through fifth grade well i'm in elementary school then that's perfect for my school and so in the reviews there are good and there's multiple reviews of the book and so that's how i do my best work then i take teacher input what do my teachers need to support the el curriculum or their science curriculum and then i take parent requests sometimes this parent is struggling with something at their house do you have anything well i don't have anything current so maybe i should get something to help that parent so i try to take all of my stakeholders which are all the people i've

057described and and and make the best informed decisions that i can and so i think all of us are trying to do that you know and and these books google them they're they've they've got reviews and and that's what we use and i don't know how else and we have the selection of resources here i can share it with you all but this is our this is what is part of our job yeah well the selection of resources are listed also in the letter from uh dr townes to me she list she lists the resources and this was updated since the email that you received one of the one of the books that was brought to the attention not too long ago i did google and looked at the reviews and honestly i was appalled

058as i mentioned earlier i have three children first second grade and fifth grade in the county school system the book that i looked at two weeks ago although it's not for elementary school um when they get older i don't want them reading about rubbing their private parts together uh i've heard and seen on social media that well they'll get the same information on tick tock so if you are okay with them being on tick tock you should be okay with them reading library books it's not the same okay because number one my kids even my fifth grader is not on tick tock there's no cell phone that's a personal choice that i've made i feel like that the content although it may have good reviews from society still should not necessarily in some specific instances

059be inside the school library um i've also heard well there's a group of people wanting to ban books i'm not in favor of banning books but i also believe in oversight and policy that i referenced earlier to help really put the burden on the school system to ensure that the appropriate books are in place well yeah and then to you know when we get ready to choose uh select textbooks at the school system we may have 10 book 10 textbooks and you choose one does that mean you're banning the other nine no that's not what that mean um if i could just say uh you know you talked about where the next steps um what would be very helpful for me is the policies that you talked about that were highlighted um to have someone

060like walk us step through step step by step through them so that we can have a clear understanding of them and then also this year you can read them i mean that's why i'm giving them i am i'm not a lawyer i'm an artist that's great well no we're not i would like i'm telling you what i would like what i would like is and what would be helpful for me as you know a community member is to understand the policy deeply to go through the book and be able to talk to and hear from librarians um for someone to walk me through the process of what actually happens when a book is challenged because all this is brand new to me right now and i want to make wise and informed decisions so i

061need the information to be able to do that well we don't have time to go step by step over these policies that's why i gave them to you because we try to make them simple enough for parents to be able to understand these policies what they are um you know if you need to if you need an attorney to talk to perhaps there is one but we just don't have time but if we're saying we're going to change the policy shouldn't we go through it to be able to decide what that's what i'm giving it to you we don't have time to read it and the next time we get together we can discuss more in depth this is just giving you information so you can you know i don't know the next time we

062get together but you have some questions about it you can ask the question i would like that and our attorney will probably be here so i our attorney will probably what is the timeline for this process that's that was going to be my next question to you guys it depended on how we decide to divide up and what we decided to do so i think a first step obviously would be i guess to define what obscene profane sexually explicit is because obviously that's not well known around this community if people masturbating and saying all kinds of curse words is acceptable to some people in the community or the population um and as far as like balancing the different like community and people in it like we are all going to have to agree on what

063is safe for our children if it's safe for your children to look at you know sexual content in a book then are you representing this whole community because for me in my part you are not because i don't agree with any of that and as far as saying cuss words even if it's written in a literature literary viewpoint that people have done great reviews on and whatnot it's trash because if you cannot make your literary stance without using customers that isn't really even an art and whatnot i don't agree with that so i do think that the first point because there's a lot of different like people in this room with backgrounds and what they think is right and what not i guess we need to establish you know what is obscene what is profane

064and what are going to be our guidelines going forward because we're not at a consensus on that of something that's acceptable or not well i think that's why i've seen community standards or just you know what the community will accept and i don't i don't think that this this is it because i think when the word of this gets out there and some people read this i think they're going to be shocked i don't think it's acceptable either it's not it's not acceptable like i say we just have to have things that are not acceptable in the workplace this is what i've always said about some of these words that these students are allowed to use and even schools uh we're not telling you right now we're not following the policy about a lot of

065that either but we are supposed to be training students to be adults productive adults in society this language and this behavior is not acceptable in any workplace that i know that you will not get fired and why are the students not allow if they're not allowed when addressing even his emails we have an order of how we're speaking i'm just kidding i'm going to clear this i feel like we're blurting all on top of each other how can we have a cup or something to put some order to this i have been sitting here holding my hand go ahead i don't mind if she does but i know he was waiting long before i was yeah i can't i can't see him and uh so what i'd like to at the risk beating a dead

066horse remind us all so we have professionals in the school system and there are choices that have been made if something is coming in without anyone vetting it that is something we need to highlight and recommend if you do not trust the people who are vetting them we can't fix that here it's the job of the school board to make sure that the administration is hiring qualified people or providing the correct oversight to make sure that they're acting a professional manner i don't think it's possible for us to nail down here what is and isn't appropriate at all the different grade levels that's my opinion it's i'm just telling you as a former teacher it is an extremely vast undertaking a lot of different considerations at different grade levels different communities as people said if

067you provide a way to provide oversight where the teachers or the librarians or the administrators vet something are forced to maybe in a way that helps them clarify their own thinking document what they saw as the benefit of something that will help if you think that you are going to be able to just lay down something out of here that will cause all teachers to conform to whatever it is that you hope them to conform to it's that's too big an undertaking and then again these are professionals if there are ones that aren't doing their job correctly we can't fix that here that's the school board's job to make sure that the administration is actually hiring and keeping qualified people we we can't we can't fix that here if you don't trust your teachers angela

068go ahead agree i kind of wanted to go back to something a long time ago where she was talking about school libraries and how in their database they can put notes um when i was referencing powerschool that was a separate alternative for individual educators in their classrooms since their books are not part of that they would be able to have the recommendation or the request from the parent i know a lot of people don't want to cover with the government and we don't want we want to have freedom of choice i want my children to have intellectual freedom other people may want moral convictions and other things to to be what's specific to their family and there's nothing wrong with that we all have ways we want to raise our children and we all want

069the choice to do that for ourselves whether regardless of our faith which we have lots of different faiths in our community our culture all of those things for one person to sit here and say this is preposterous you have one person sitting next to you he says that's not preposterous so in order to be fair to everyone we should have the freedom to choose for our children being able to speak to our educator put in our request you can opt in at the beginning of the year that you have literature reading material requests that you want to be met throughout the year something easy that they could do a registration the librarian could also receive that information what books are there because to me i think of our budgets and having a whole staff who's

070going to now sit down each of your teachers probably have hundreds and hundreds of books in their classrooms you think it's a few books and one and that one teacher's behavior i think that's a specific disciplinary situation that i'm talking to the broad whole who just have books in their classroom because it's been proven through many studies that when they have access to books in their classroom they're more likely to read so that's why they're in the classrooms i'm not opposed to having lists or whatever they need to do to track that but when i think of the financial and the labor constraint on our educators right now in the environment i think that's definitely something we have to consider and give a lengthy amount of time in order to incorporate if we move that

071way that's one thing but nobody is talking about teachers making lists of books that they have in their room i am talking about fixing the policy i don't want list of the books that teachers have in their room that is not what i'm asking for how do you track it i'm not trying to track in their room i was talking about this specific teacher that said i said if there are teachers doing that we need to fix that in the policy that teachers cannot if books are banned or restricted in the library they can't take them through the room and check them out so you don't want to know what's in the classroom library yeah yes i do the libraries i'm talking about the libraries not the ones that teachers have in their room for

072reading extra reading material for the students that the teachers have put there the teachers i'm very confused what your request just library books on the shelves not the books that are in the classrooms you want us to just focus on the library books because i felt like earlier you said all the all the books that are not curriculum that's what we want to look at and now it's just what she's talking about like i go in you know my kindergarten class and they may have 75 books in there for the kids to pick and choose the teachers don't have to make a list of that you're talking about making this arduous process that's not what i'm i'm not talking about putting any more work on the teachers i didn't hear her say that i i

073just don't understand how you vet or track information without having a list of it like i i i know that's fine don't pick a list whatever you want to do i just need clarification i totally misunderstood and i haven't gone over all of these lists in all these libraries this is what i'm concerned about right now but i was just talking about certain teachers bragging about the fact that they took restricted and banned books and checked them out in their room that's what i was talking about i wasn't talking about like my grandson goes up and gets a book out of the teachers and and reads it you know if you have a problem with one of those books then you can follow a recommendation but you're trying to get out in the weeds i

074just want to fix this policy i want to know how these books are are ending up in our libraries with this language in there and let me tell you what's going to happen if we don't fix this i don't know if you're aware there's legislation right now for the money to follow the child and it will probably pass if we don't fix things like this if we can't even agree that the f word and the gd word and the mf word and all of that are unacceptable for our students you are going to find out just exactly how upset parents are because a lot of these teachers are going to be finding another job we have to fix this now we can get in down into the weeds and say well you know you're trying

075to force your moral compass no i'm not i'm just telling you what will the community bear these are their schools they pay for them these students belong to these parents and if we can't fix this something as simple as this if we can't agree that this kind of language and illustrations about teaching children to masturbate are not acceptable and for our schools then these parents are going to take their money and they're going to go elsewhere and when they do public education is going to continue to deteriorate now that's all i'm asking i'm not wanting to get out into the weeds i just wanted to know what books are in there i'm wanting to know now the best way to go about that if you don't want to be on this committee if you think

076it's a waste of time if you think it's something we can't accomplish you don't have to be here we'll put somebody else in your place but right now this is what i'm wanting to do i wanted to try to fix the policy to fix it to where all the books that are in the classroom are vetted whether they're brought in from the outside whether they're put in reading centers or wherever they're put in that they are vetted and i did ask for a list of those books and these library books right now is all we're concerned that i'm concerned about because i can't get into all the extra reading materials that teachers have in their rooms right now that's not what i'm talking about so just library books on the shelves a lot just library

077books right now and the books that are in reading centers that are in they're being put in there by outside organizations they should be vetted by the school system and if they are and if there's some questionable ones there we'll find out how they got past the vetting process and fix it in the policy that's all we're trying to do there's no sense getting out into the weeds and getting all analytical and all of this stuff out there and trying to muddy the water that's very basically simple what we're trying to do but like i say if we can't fix something as simple as this then i'm afraid that people are going to find out just exactly how unhappy parents really are that is who owns this school system we do not i'll see i'll

078speak as another parent three children in the school system that i disagree with some of the um some of the sentiments that have been stated about what parents find acceptable and unacceptable so i think you'll find as you talk to different people in the community we have as angela said a wide variety of views and viewpoints and things that we find acceptable are unacceptable for our children and if we start to pick how many customers are left that's why we have to have a community norm there has to be it can't be up here it can't be down here it has to be something the children have first amendment rights that's why we should choose well but nobody's telling the children what they can say and are there or they have first amendment rights to

079have access to these materials well they can they they can they have them at the bookstore okay like i said we're looking right now keep in mind excuse me these are all things we need to keep in mind okay yeah well like i say they're all available nobody's trying to ban any books saying whether if you want can you if you can't afford them maybe there's a library i mean can you not go get your child the books that they want that's not what we're talking about maybe i think because we have so many different views of the specifics it might make sense for everybody to come up with several categories of things that teachers librarians should consider when vetting something we've talked about categories like obscenity language and we know that different things are

080appropriate different grade levels different communities so perhaps the way to have a a tool that helps the vetting occur and helps people document why they chose something and helps us also think about how do we get categories here because we're not all going to agree on those details but how do we get categories that we all could agree we would like teachers to think about this even though we each have a different answer for that category this is what we want to make sure people are thinking about that's what perhaps we should come up with either transforming now or for the next session it's in the handbook that's that's for the librarian's handbook it's not teachers it's librarian okay we're going to have to move on because we'll be here all night so how do

081we want to i think that might be a good idea just to find out the things that we want to put in here if you have some books you want to vet we're not going through we're not saying we're going to look at this book and that book and that's just exactly not not what we're doing if there's a book that's questionable there's a list of books here that were have been sent to me uh that were questionable i don't know if any of these are in any of our libraries because i have not checked uh if you want to look at some of those you can um but how is reading those books going to help us rewrite the policy and look at the policy he was asking about where are you going to

082read the books if you want to read the books you can read the books i think we just need to make the policy and see if the books if any of these books don't fit within that policy then they need to be relooked at by the administration so are we going to bypass the reconsideration process that the librarians have already said they can be put through the reconsideration process shouldn't the school board be the body that decides that which it always has been they're in charge of policy so wouldn't it not that's what i say we're making recommendations because the board was unaware that some of these books were in there that's why i said this is this committee's job is to make recommendations for a new policy but then the school board actually it's

083their it's their charge to write policies that's what we went over that in the beginning kathy i guess you weren't here but anyway yes that we are to make recommendations to the board we're not going to write a new policy we're just going to correct some of the policies that we have or or beef them up or rewrite them or whatever that's that's what we're going that's what the recommendation from this committee i guess if we can can we all get a copy of the librarian handbook to read uh sorry i just don't see how we could do anything better than what they have professionally done here and the it has been yes and it already exists it was and it's a living document so it was updated in september or october i think it

084was october and the email that you have printed out from dr townes is from august 24th so i don't know if this email contradicts in the handbook i don't know but the librarian handbook is by far the best tool that we have and it creates room for the subjectiveness of our different communities because we are one big community made up of different ones and i i just want to encourage everyone in this room to just it's so impressive and and like nicole said it's not perfect and and stuff gets by but there is an appeal process that if you don't like this the appeal is to go to the school board with the book okay yes that's true like i said my friends have had their hand right you and you i just want to

085[Music] yes so hi i'm kelsey i am a ela teacher uh in an urban middle school in hamilton county um and i just wanted to clarify um you said that we wanted to focus on library books right that are in our libraries not in the classrooms um but then you also said that you wanted to look at the books that have been donated by outside organizations um i feel like we need to clarify that because in classrooms that's where a lot of those outside organizations will donate to directly to the classrooms and not the school library so i know that you know whatever list that we were talking about you know the the the list that you said at the beginning that you could maybe get to us with the books that have been donated

086um it would also be helpful to clarify are these all donated to the library or to the classrooms because as a teacher who's in the schools every single day i can tell you i'm an la teacher this is my first full year as the teacher of record there are like a thousand books on my bookshelf in my classroom and i do not have the time to have read all of those i am so busy all the time and so you know reading all of those is kind of like impossible right now for most teachers especially first-year teachers or younger teachers who are just kind of coming in and getting these books handed to them i was just kind of books were shoved in my hand when i first started so um i think we need

087to clarify you said not to focus on the classroom books just the library books but also what the outside organizations have donated so in that way we need to figure out is that classroom wise or are we literally just focusing on the school library books these reading centers they they they come into a classroom and set up a reading center and they have their own books those books belong to that organization from what i understand they don't belong so are you specifically just targeting one organization because we're one of so many okay well then maybe there's another one this is just this seems very targeted i'm asking you a question she was asking do those books belong to the library or those books belong to you we install classroom libraries in the organization that i

088have taken part in i've also been involved with other donation drives and book donations from libraries and the public who've just had a teacher who did a donor's choose for classroom books that they need for their classroom those are not curriculum those are not specific instructional materials they're all optional reading it's not just we put 12 classroom libraries in 60 schools that all have classrooms that have a thousand books in them we are such a fraction okay well but i'm just clarifying why my organization is your books or do those belong to the library did they belong the books that we donated were donated to teachers in specific grades for their classroom use they are not part of the school library right so we need to clarify i think are we solely focusing on the

089library books in the school library in that one school library or the books in the schools in general because that would be a much bigger monster to take on and if that is something that we want to take on we're going to have to really set some standards for that because again as someone who's in the schools every day there's a lot of books in the schools that aren't just in the library just look at the ones in the library and the ones that are in the library and other other books that some people find extremely offensive maybe we could make a list of some of those parents because some books are really very vile i'll just tell you they're they're really very bad and maybe make a list of those and say if these

090books are there we want to be sure that they're they're not put into our libraries and if they do they happen to be in there you are suggesting that we're taking my books out of the libraries then you know they have to have a record well they may i don't know it's not up to me i i'm just trying to get it through the reconsideration process okay so we're making lists of books [Music] the reconsideration process just take care of it on the front end instead of having to take care of it on the back end no i'm not talking about i don't know i'm not going to look at these books and tell you which ones need to be there which ones don't that's going to be under the policy if they don't meet

091them yeah you just gave us a list so i mean it was in our packet so we that's why we think we're supposed to look at books when you give us a list of books no these are books of concern that were sent to me i was just giving you all some information if you want you might want to add some books on here you might think you may want to put [Music] that's not what this list is for this list is for some books that were sent to me by parents and by others that said ron do we have a form of these books where you look at this book and so we're hoping to improve or edit the policy the school board policy and also the school librarian handbook policy because they already

092have a selection policy so my question is okay this question is if the if the paw if the handbook is working how did these books get through well did the people go through the reconsideration process or not that would be the first thing is did these people just email you about these books that's what i'm talking about this is what i'm talking about did they go through the reconsideration process and then how many kids may already have this book in their hands so yes or no they have gone through the reconsideration process i think we should fact check with the district on that because i've requested open records request of the review what is it called the citizens reconsidering instructional material forms now i do know that this handy little link that we have is

093fairly new after some legislation over the last year but i did i'm still waiting for some of the information to come to me but i did request for like the last five years how many times this process has been used was it accessible what was the resolution and what was um uh reconsidered so to my knowledge at this point just verbally i've heard that there's only been one that's actually made it to a board situation and that that hasn't been used nearly as prevalently as the verbal requests and bypassing of the process and coming to the board has been ultimately the board has the final say but it's been superseding the process so we're saying that the policy doesn't work but we're not giving the policy the opportunity to work so i would request that

094something that's been newly implemented we haven't even had that poli that form up a year it's not even been up a year we don't even have data from it yet even and to even dig into it okay okay don't let someone else go on because what i'm saying is okay if the policy is working how do these books end up in our library so obviously it needs to be changed the process needs to be away okay it takes time do you know how many books are in the school yeah no no these are not these are not old books maybe parents need to be educated about the policy yes i was looking over this library collection and optional materials from um policy number and and it's kind of confusing because it says that the books

095will be continually monitored who's monitoring these books okay that they have to go through it um i think yearly angularly so they're following the rules that and then they rely on partnership for people to bring reconsideration which it sounds like usually you point out we forgot how to talk to people and have a conversation yes okay it says they will be monitored but then it says that there will be books that have not been reviewed by school personnel that's that's well that's confusing like it's leaving a loophole right there you can have books that's supposed to be minor but they're that was the idea of that was the paragraph i read i don't know if you were here yet but yeah read this paragraph that's why i said i don't know how that how that

096paragraph got through without someone questioning well the librarians detailed how they would play out that policy in their handbook and they cite that policy and how they would handle it in the handbook and obviously it's not working it's which is what she does i don't think that's about next steps i would just encourage i think what has come up a lot is the sheer volume of books and the personnel hours that we have available to monitor the books there's a big disconnect there so if this is something that's important to the district i think we've got to put money behind it yes you know now we'll worry about the money later right now right now that doesn't work because we don't have the money to pay payments well surely we can surely we can vet

097some books without having to go up on taxes who decides which books get vetted i mean there's millions of millions they all should be vetted they all should be vetted we shouldn't be putting books on the shelf that no one's looked at and no one's been able to uh uh have professional reviews okay let's get back to where we started their professional review boards the librarians use professional review boards that rate the books and so they actually have that in part of their policy listen you know have you ever seen some of the books i've seen some of the movies that win awards there's some of the worst movies are not the same some of those have their own agenda too i did read up on some of the organizations that we rely on to

098send us requests for books so are we talking about political so affiliations know that's not the end i'll be all the end all be all in hamilton county are the hamilton county parents and this we're professionals and we know what's best if your kid doesn't always cut it for me because as we've seen in the past couple of years sometimes the professionals get it very wrong well that's why you have called and so so therefore the parents get a say in this and that's why we're putting it out there for all parents to see all parents to look at all parents to know the process if they have a problem with the book a lot of parents didn't even know there was a process to reconsider they did not know that now they do this

099is an informational meeting and like i said how do you want to proceed in order if you want to look at some of these books you can look at these books if you come when we meet again if you have some questions about the policies you can bring those questions about about the policies do we need to email somebody about creating an agenda for next time so that we have like a plan in place on how well that's why i'm having this meeting tonight it's an organizational meeting to find out how you wanted to proceed that's what this is that's what i say proud to you well i've asked whether you want to divide up into groups uh if you want to just uh on your own go over and try to digest some of

100this do some of your own research see what you can find out there are a lot of schools school districts that have already done a lot of uh summaries of some of the some of these books there's all kinds of information on the internet i just need to know what we need to do to fix these policies that keep some of the uh some of the books that are on our school shelves keep them from getting there to begin with i still think it's important for the school board to set the policy and let and once they have set the policy we have kathy i know but this it was 28 it was two it was in eighteen what does that mean that's what we're going to recommend because like i said the school board

101did not even know the process for how boots got into the library well then if the school it should start with the school board which is dead and that's why they've made this committee yeah and so they aren't willing to they aren't willing to because normally policy review is the review with on administration with um and the school board and it's it's a process i was i was on the policy committee for two years and that is where i would like to that's where it should start instead we don't make policy we're not making policy we are making recommendations we're telling them what this committee has found out and give back back to them because most of the school board i mean they're not going to sit down and go through a lot of this

102because they need to sit down and go through it that's their job i know i have a job that's my second job i just have one last question and i'm done my last question is shouldn't supplemental reading be held to the same standards as library books so just asking i mean shouldn't all books in the school that children are exposed to shouldn't they all be held to the same standard or or should we say well in the classrooms you can have your ball material and or whatever but in the library we've got them you're talking about all three different things you have optional reading you have supplemental reading and you have life and you have curriculum no objections you have different in the school but they have different laws that protect them there's different criteria

103for all of them and how they're used and how they're implemented it's not just thrown around for no reason you have all these people with master degrees who curate these because they have different purposes different jobs they have different reasons they have to hit all of these um ela standards that they have to meet they all have jobs but optional reading is different it's simple to have jobs without children that they are teaching at schools and what rhonda just said earlier you take all if this stuff doesn't stop and there's not that there's not a late a lie drawn in the sand these public schools are going to be no more because the people are going to take their children out the money's gonna fall out i don't have a crystal ball i'm just talking

104about what we're here for today talking about real life we're talking about children we're talking about children at school and what they're exposed to rhonda has the school board requested that the district come up with an option for tracking their reading materials because i wonder if the director of schools has a list because they have a master list of all the libraries have you asked those that have to deal with this every day if they would offer a solution have we asked them what they would propose as a solution since they're going to be the ones tasked with this job because while i can come up with ideas of grandeur and how i would love to have things right a bunch of them are sitting right behind you well i'm not their boss and they're

105hearing this conversation so if they have recommendations to talk about specifically they are free to say so as well no i am not their boss the superintendent is their mother okay i can't tell them to do anything they're listening to this and the superintendent is the one who tells them what to do i am not their boss i am their boss's boss i i get that so uh no i don't go over there and tell blake what he needs to do or or any of the rest of them over there what they need to do the superintendent does so they're hearing all this discussion and from this if they claim that there's something that maybe that they're not doing or that needs to be changed in this policy they're welcome to say so as well

106on the topic of how we move forward so i've been kind of thinking and listening for a minute and i kind of wrote down four main categories i'm hearing and for the record i don't necessarily agree that all these categories are the right idea but some of the ones that i probably think are others don't so i'm gonna list if you'll give me leave for a second the four categories i'm hearing and then maybe others could then chime in if i've missed a broad category and then we can decide how many of these we actually want to tackle uh how many sessions we think that's going to take so here's the four and again this is just me listening so uh so number one is a case study so the question has come up a

107couple times how did something get in there so that's one possible category approach is pick one or two things and figure out well how did they get there what do we fix out of that two this is the one that i suggested uh review the policies that are in the the library handbook or what have you and is there anything missing that we want to make sure is considered category three an examination of where we interface with outside organizations whether that's library professional review organizations whether that's people bring books into the school examine or try to shed some light on exactly what those interfaces are fourth category is the define some no-go topics things that people want to say this the end should not be in the school so again for the record i don't

108think necessarily all these categories are good ideas but i'm just one person those are the categories i'm hearing so if you think i missed something big there or or you think that's worth adding on to maybe the next step is to say what categories as a whole i missed i like reviewing the idea of reviewing the policies and number two and reading the handbook and seeing if we have any places where it's lacking and the the only problem i have with the case study is some of the librarians walk into a situation walk into a library and they don't put all those books on the shelves and there's no record but it is interesting to ask how it gets on there i met for two hours with one with each librarian and i came out

109with a pretty big idea of how things can be problematic how they handle that and how it gets on there and i came up with and i've said this before i'll say it again a lot of respect for librarians and a big idea that they're doing better than i ever could so are there categories that i missed entirely are there in category and again i don't know if the next step is to figure out what order we want to tackle these i know some of them again may or may not be good ideas to in to particular people here but i'm hearing enough from enough people just in my opinion that those seem to be the big categories okay no hold up i was just wondering you have a the student code of conduct what

110children can or cannot stay in the classroom and how they are to behave so wouldn't it be just very simple to use that in determining if the child can't say it or speak that or call a name to a teacher or another child why would you have it in what purpose would have it in books for them to read well if i mean there's books about bullying and i want my people to read about bullying so they know how it goes down and have some exposure so just because it's against the how they act is not how i want it to be stated in their books so they might mismatch but that's also but sometimes that i've been reading here it had nothing to do with that it was just a crazy story made up

111to use all those words and and again whatsoever in it and another thing about the books that review when you review these the libraries that you know evidently they have um they don't have time to read everyone so they look at the reviews i'm wondering are they rated x or pg or how do they know is there a way in those there is has language or something so when you're reviewing those when you're reading the views reviews it would say in there whether or not it had uh bad language or sexual content or something like that so you do know when you're picking those at that point that that's what's in that book right but you also look at the age level and if it's appropriate i mean i don't want to be explicit here

112but we know high schoolers are having sex and so there may be um they're making sexual content all high schoolers are having sex like that's that's part of you know so you're saying unless they read a book they don't know how to have sex is that it is part of the whole going forward is is it correct that we're still on the hook for reporting back to the school board for the march meeting is that the plan uh well if we need more time we can have more time stephen yeah when you were making a list can i i want to formally ask rhonda how can we formally invite or request that the attorney and um someone invite because i know we can't ask or we can't make them be here but invite um one

113of the directors or someone who is much more fluent in the policy to be here along with the attorneys who can help us we have someone right here but he's on our committee so i feel like that's a little different i would like to have an outside committee he's actually not on the committee he is here as a representative okay so what is your capacity sir i didn't i didn't hear the introduction okay so policy is where i can help clarify that okay i do want to say you study therapy earlier the in the packet that mr gave us policy 4.402 selection material let's make i think that was what i was asking because i feel like there's a lot of um confusion just in in my opinion and i may even be wrong in

114this but there's the terminology and some of the policy gets a little hairy and so sometimes you feel like you're you don't know if you're talking about instructional policy optional reading or stuff that's in the libraries and so all of those have different policy that applies to them separately so if we're changing policy we have to know which lane we're in as to which policy we're reviewing for each different thing and then as we're reviewing that i would love to have the attorney present because some of the things that we're proposing violate some rights or we would like some clarification as to whether it does or doesn't um under someone's recommendation i i would just like to have that safeguard to know that i'm not making a poor choice before our school board attorney is

115not here tonight he had that's why i said moving forward i've spoken with him yes uh but like i said since this was an organizational meeting i didn't sure feel like we would really need him that much tonight so i told him that was fine but uh violating people's rights i'm i'm sorry i'm not getting that but whatever um because i'm certainly not want to violate anyone's rights uh i'm just wanting to [Music] like i say uh to get uh to inform the public about what their tax dollars are paying for what's in our library i hope these products can clarify some of that because i don't want i mean as you mentioned we could be setting ourselves up for a lawsuit for violating students first amendment right so i i'm also eager for the

116attorney's input on that and i have one more thing to say i know you keep talking about taxpayer dollars but it needs to be really clear that until just a few years ago and i wish dr parker could speak to this and i don't know if you remember it was actually dr robertson who helped us at the time but he got us a line item in the budget and i was that like four or five years ago so prior to that point librarians were solely um earning their own money and so the majority of my library books most certainly i i'm not trying to be ugly but they're not necessarily taxpayer dollars at all and so um and right now the majority of my budget is probably from hamilton county is i mean if it's

117a quarter of it i don't even it's probably not even a quarter of it at this point and so um a lot i think that needs to be really clear because we we work really hard to raise money in order to provide books for our students and um even just simple supplies run our libraries and so until just a few years ago we weren't even a line item which means we had nothing unless we were gifted something um so i think that well i'm just talking about the schools the schools belong to the right my schools never gave me money i had to i had to earn it with book fairs like i was never and i've been in uh from urban to suburban to now upper middle class schools and um i i was

118never except for one time my very first year was i given title one money i mean it was just not i just think that needs to be clear to everybody the majority of the books in every library in hamilton county was not paid for from hamilton county school district that shouldn't exempt them from a standard or policy she was just pointing out the taxpayer remarks that have been made she was just talking about herself right but not books on the shelves that's what she was just clarifying she wasn't saying now i'm free of responsibility between the two though okay so um so who wants so to review the policies so the next time we get together you want this attorney here to explain the policies is that is that what i'm getting here should we

119ask someone from the library leadership committee to come and explain the handbook you're on air yes well done so um so everybody sherry just be sure everyone has a copy of the okay send it to everyone um then um you know we had a lady come to our church one time who've never been to church before and uh it reminded me this defined no-go words and things like that she asked she she started cussing at church and my husband being elder went to her i said you know you you can't say these words at church you know this is not acceptable and she said can you make me a list of words i can't say he said no i can't can you imagine an elder sitting down writing all this so i don't think we

120can write define no-go words we can't sit down and write every i think it's like here again that's where it gets to community standards and the standards should be like nancy was saying should be things that are not acceptable in the classroom not accept words that are not acceptable and just a polite society i mean we can't go through and tell everybody every word they can't say but it's kind of like pornography you don't really can't define it but you know when you see it i mean if you see some of these words you know they're just not right they're not okay for kids they're just not okay and we shouldn't have to make a list of those words that are no go obscenity the words obscenity vulgar so we should know what those words

121are in tennessee law already they already define obscenity yeah but they didn't make a list of those words so that's what makes it vague but the definition so where is that do you know is that documented where's that do you know where that's documented or does anybody know yeah which do you know like where i mean tennessee state law is pretty good okay thank you yeah but uh yeah they're and not gonna say they're they're looking at a new policy of this our new legislative legislators are looking at new legislation uh about um obscenity to minors and things like this so i say that's the news it's in here uh it's in your list of material here uh it was a proof state law it was proposed today but it's not it's it was just

122proposed today okay and it took us a while but we are defining our scope as just library books is that what we've decided and supplemental reading also right yeah policy and standards policy and standards should be number one focus okay okay well okay okay we'll make the paul okay we'll just if we fix the policies that should take them all in yeah just reading material how's that so then now we're opening up technology every reading material because every kid has a chromebook every kid has a chromebook so if we do all reading material then we need to do curriculum chromebooks library books not textbooks the corrections okay so everything that's on a chromebook oh come on if it's i'm we've got to define it you know we can't there's no way it would be impossible

123that's why i think that's why i'm just asking what the definition of books and books that are provided in library in supplemental reading centers and libraries so the books in the class centers and libraries how is that and on the school library shelves that the libraries would take in books on library shelves i would think well the chromebooks are already sent to where they don't accept i'm seeing language oh no no though no it's not chocolate you i can get a chromebook right now i'll show you one baby chromebook yeah yes yes inside underneath the network or outside the network yes they are well if they're not then that's another issue yeah i've talked to the board about that as well okay so can you define the books again just i if we're going to

124get really detailed about policy i just want to know which ones we're doing library books policies are here will you clarify which policies you want us to look at just give us the numbers and that would solve a lot of this okay you only have three right but some is like advertising and i know and i just did that for obscenity uh reasons uh to show you that that we do have rules against obscenity when people talk about first amendment rights already have policies against that so uh that's where those were so we're looking at basically a 4.402 and 4.403 i think i want those the two yes okay and then the reason that we put this other one uh distributed materials in school shows also we can't be handing out things in classrooms that

125are on scene so a lot of those things are already covered they're just not evidently we're just not uh classroom libraries and school libraries all the libraries so 403 is instructional materials and textbooks and you want us to look at the bottom if you look at the bottom the library collection and optional materials okay so just certain lines which lines it's all one policy uh the lot the uh on the page two number nine fixing library and 4.402 and then and 4.403 the whole policy that policy right there is a reconsideration of instructional material in textbooks but you don't want us to look at that part of the policy we're just considering we're discussing that library collection it's just okay let's just work on this one okay oh two yeah 4.402 yes can we all

126agree that we all can work on this and we're thinking about how to bring in a million books and like i said if we can't even agree on these people we have some serious issues we cannot agree we can get together as a group of parents educators and professional people and say that some of this stuff is unacceptable and how do we keep this out of our schools parents are going to lose complete and total confidence in public schools and i don't blame them if we this is why you get out into the weeds this started out as something so simple to fix this fix the policies to where these books are not available to children and they sit on the book and it takes a long time to go through this uh reconsideration of

127material it takes a long time to go through that process oh it's 15 days uh not till the book gets it bro it's 50 about yeah you have to go through the summary submit it they go through it you have 15 days and then they may decide to put it back on there or you can appeal to a school board as a board we don't know what books are being put back on there what books are taken off and do we know that blake are we ever we are we told about that when books are removed i've never been notified while i've been on the board i don't let jamie think to that as well there haven't been any books that have been removed most of these are handled for policy as school level where

128an optional selection is given to the student to be able to complete and so to my knowledge i don't think that we ever removed any through that process the first part of that policy deals with the school level so if there is an injectable uh tax that's [Music] since i've been on the board i've been there so far i don't think it's ever happened so all these books that parents have complained about are still but that's what i'm talking about so if we can get it on the front end because on the back end it doesn't seem to be that we can be able to get that done i guess mr thurman so today i came in on two wheels from atlanta moving forward is this going to be a monthly meeting uh well um

129i was i was thinking probably he was wanting us to report back in in march but that's just not going to happen uh is uh so my next question was when do we want to when can we just or is tuesday night it's a good time tuesday at five is every night for most people [Music] thursday night's usually when we have school board meetings monday nights and when we have agenda sessions wednesday night a lot of people go to church and they're not available select us don't leave but friday and monday and tuesday and fridays are no ghosts for me and i'm sure there are for most of you um for the what if we moved it to six o'clock would that help y'all tuesdays at six tuesdays are you still speaking once per month

130um i started saying it shouldn't take very long the next time we come together i hope that the attorney's here and we can kind of maybe fix fix this so let's do it uh sherry how about um about in three weeks maybe three weeks on a tuesday what what is that date march okay march the first march the first this i tell you what this is make the difference it's more 5 30 work [Music] because we're getting into the bedsheet session so that does take up a lot of our time but will that work for most people because there's probably one the next week too i know a lot of people are gonna have scheduling issues um so i hate to even bring this up but march first does not work for me okay well

131then we're having that budget meeting that night anyway so let's uh let's go to the next week and put it about two weeks from now [Music] okay so we will try to have scott here our school board attorney the next time maybe he will be available work well in this setting okay we get feedback and it's when we're trying to live stream it just don't work do you want us to come in with recommendations for this policy yeah i think that would be good just look over the policy and then we can talk to scott about how how to if that language works or if it doesn't work like i said a lot of this informational stuff to just show you the stuff that's out there um and show you what the tennessee state legislature

132is looking at to kind of fit our policy to that because this would not say this was just proposed but i will be real surprised that this does not pass and also to get with jamie and others and find out exactly why these boots are not removed when parents have complained about them exactly why they continue to be put back even after complaints i'd like to hear that side too we will just cover some of that the next time the policy says they have this day i just want to clarify that what what what you asked was how many times did it come to our attention and my reply was that we followed the policy that's right exact policy says that the text stays in circulation unless through the policy it needs to be removed

133yeah and we have not reached a moment where we need to enact the removal so that's why we need to fix the policy which is exactly my point if nothing that has been brought before the vetting process has been removed so we're trying to make it easier to remove books no we're trying to make it for these books don't get on the shelf to begin with they show kids how to masturbate right but that was the question was how do we make it how many times have the books been taken off the shelves or removed from circulation when they've been brought up and then you said never right and then you said well we have to figure out a way to make that not happen well that's right we need to figure out a way

134to keep this book going the parent comes from and follows the report is not keeping this book off the shelf then we need to fix the policy i just had one question though did you earlier say that when the book is when a parent complains that the book stays in circulation and the child is offered a an alternate boot to read that meets the same curriculum standards right yeah correct yes there anyways if there's a same curriculum standard in another book because some people define vile differently like i know someone who wanted to have a book removed because it had divorce in it and i know when harry and i know when harry potter came out is a great example because a lot of people didn't want any of their kids reading about i would

135just like to ask if any of the books that we've discussed have gone through this review process can we get confirmation if any of the books that have been referenced during this committee have gone through i think a couple of years maybe two but out of that entire list i feel like we're changing policy over two books and i think that should be held into account i mean i i just think that if people have issues with books they need to go through the policy and handle it with their principles in their school we haven't that hasn't happened we don't have data we don't have any any track saying that that process has happened so i feel like we're making changes based off of hearsay and to me legally that doesn't make sense that we're

136making changes based off of gossip parents don't even know these books are in the schools they're not aware that hasn't come home to their child and they haven't had it then they don't have to go through the process and maybe maybe again that means that we need to really do an intense education of the parents about what the policy is so that if they choose to challenge a book they know what to do in the process when you're doing that right now hence why with this as being live stream and i know several parents have done that power school thing sometimes parents are hearing this for the first time they had no idea and not all parents see all books that their kids bring home and are reading some parents are very much unaware and

137some kids know that their parents are going to object they will not bring the book home and lay it out for their parents to see sure don't do that i asked the process questions um will we be taking a vote on our recommendations to the board because i don't feel like we necessarily have a consensus about what recommendation needs to be made or well we'll see well i don't know i would ask for that and that maybe we go we go on record a thing whether we are in favor of this recommendation we'll just make whatever we'll just make recommendations the board's going to do what they want to do with our recommendations if we may have two or three different recommendations we don't have to we i mean it's not like we're voting on

138the policy we just have to make recommendations it just feels more democratic that way it just feels more democratic to feel like we all have a vote but that's up to you rhonda well you can you can make a recommendation and you can make one and you can make one we'll take all the recommendations awesome yeah that's very that's more like a republic than a democracy so we can all say so anyway okay so we'll see you then on the 22nd at 5 30.