Escambia Superintendent Keith Leonard vows to evaluate 200+ challenged books over several days

Escambia County Public Schools Superintendent Keith Leonard is taking matters into his own hands when it comes to chiseling down the district’s book challenge list that now tops 200.

Leonard told school board members in a workshop Thursday that he would be joining the school district’s Coordinator of Media Services, Bradley Vinson, in the “very near future” to go down the list, book by book, even if it takes days to do it.

The promise of action comes only a month after community members protested outside the walls of the J.E. Hall Center and demanded that the books awaiting a decision but stuck in “book jail” be released back to the shelves to be checked out by students.

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“The next step is what I wanted to make certain that I talked to you about,” Leonard told the school board. “If I need to, I’ll talk to the public about (it.) We will set aside several days in the very near future. When I’m talking about ‘we,’ I’m talking about Miss Vinson and myself. As your policy stipulates to go through every… I think it’s 228 books that have been challenged. Bradley and I will go through every one of those. We will make decisions where we can make decisions. Where we cannot, that’s where we start back up committee work, we go into your policy and do the things that we need to do. However many (books) it ends up being, we will work to bring those back here.”

“I wanted you to know where we are,” Leonard said. “I know that it is taking a considerable amount of time, but we’ve been deliberate. You (school board) did and gave us direction to make certain that we were protecting our people and doing what we needed to do for our students.”

Once the two are finished weeding out books that can be removed from school libraries, they’ll reinstate the district’s book review committees to evaluate the books that were allowed to stay in the first round in more depth.

Since ECPS received their first book challenge in June nearly two years ago, only 23 decisions have been made on citizen challenges: Nine books have been removed at all grade levels, eight books have been restricted at all grade levels and six books have been retained including the Bible, which is legally protected under Florida Statute 1003.45(1).

One of the books yet to be returned to shelves is “And Tango Makes Three,” a children's book about two male penguins raising a chick in a New York City zoo, which is at the heart of a lawsuit championed by authors, ECPS parents, the publishing company Penguin Random House and the free-speech group PEN America.

“As you know, there’s several different lawsuits that are out there,” Leonard said. “Our media specialists, along with Bradley (Vinson) and Linda Sweeting, have done the work in going through 600-something-thousand books. Day in and day out, they’re working to get things done.”

“And then we had the lawsuit on (HB) 1557,” Leonard continued. “A number of those books that have been set aside have been set back on the shelves. Not all of them, because there are some of those books that perhaps need to be reviewed deeper for objectionable material, whether it be age inappropriate or obscene in nature.”

Leonard said some of the current challenges will be easier to resolve than others, like books that haven’t been checked out by students in decades.

“I think it’s important that people understand that some of these books have just been on the shelf," said District 5 Board Member Bill Slayton. “Since they’ve just been sitting there, gathering dust, and not being used, and not being suggested for student usage − we’re going to get rid of them.”

In the meantime, students are not hurting for books to check out, according to Leonard.

“I would dare say…590-something-thousand books is a lot of books. So, I believe our students have resources…they have plenty of material to read,” Leonard said. “We hope they’re taking advantage of it.”

District 1 Board Member Kevin Adams praised Leonard’s leadership, and affirmed the board would “take care of” the books that end up back in their board meetings for a final decision.

“You’re showing good leadership on this matter,” Adams told Leonard Thursday. “I think you know where I stand with this age-inappropriate content. It don’t need to be in our schools. I compliment you and Miss Bradley for working through this issue and then the board, we’re the community standard. So, if those books need to be challenged, it will come right here to this board…. we take care of it like we did before.”

The board will reconvene for a special school board workshop and legislative update at 4:30 p.m. on May 21 followed by their regular school board meeting at 5:30 p.m. at the J.E. Hall Center at 30 E. Texar Drive.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Escambia superintendent vows to evaluate over 200 challenged books