National conversation on banning books comes knocking at Knox County Schools' doors

Twenty-five years ago, some parents were concerned about the content of a new book for children: "Harry Potter." Looking through a religious lens, they were worried the book would teach their children witchcraft.

Knox County Schools' academic resources supervisor Sarah Searles used the example as a way to remind school board members that the discussion on banning books isn't new, and that perspectives can change over time.

The national conversation on challenging books that relate to gender, sex and race-related topics has come knocking on Knox County Schools' doors. The solution? Committees at the school and district level will work to review titles proactively.

"Our existing processes, while they have been robust, they have been reactive," Searles said. "They've waited for concerns to come in."

Her office is aware of the national discussion, she said, and reviewing titles on topics that some consider sensitive requires "complex decision making."

The district is forming school library councils and sensitive title review committees.

The school-level councils will have five to seven stakeholders including a librarian, the principal or their designee, a classroom teacher, counselor and a parent. This group will identify each library's needs including making library spaces more accessible to the community and removing outdated titles.

The sensitive title review committees will be one at each school level: elementary, middle and high schools. Each committee will have a representative from each of the district's five regions. These committees will send recommendations to individual school library councils, whose decision will be final.

"Our challenge to these review committees is to provide an unbiased evaluation to the school library councils," she said.

The system is a first for the district and the specifics are still being figured out. For starters, the review committees will evaluate the following three books:

• "A Tale Dark and Grimm", by Adam Gidwitz will be reviewed by the elementary school committee.

• "Hey, Kiddo" by Jarrett J. Krosoczka will be reviewed by the middle school committee.

• "Gender Queer", by Maia Kobabe will be reviewed by the high school committee.

These books' reviews will be used to test the process.

"Because of the complexity, there will be times where we need to remove titles from a collection. There will also be times where we receive complaints or concerns and those titles will not exit the collection," Searles said. "If we've done our job right with an unbiased review process, we believe we will catch each of those cases."

How the conversation started

Public forum speakers at the April 4 school board meeting addressed all sides of book banning. Students from West High School spoke about finding a feeling of safety and comfort from diverse books. Susan Groenke, director of the center for children’s and young adult literature at the University of Tennessee, wore a T-shirt saying “Make Orwell Fiction Again” and implored board members not to ban books.

"Sensitive titles help adolescents empathize with others," she said in her bid to the board.

Sheri Super, chair of the local Moms for Liberty chapter, previously asked the board to remove certain books from schools' libraries. She spoke about queer theory − a topic at the center of books being challenged.

"Queer theory wants to collapse boundaries between children and adults by sexualizing children with books like 'Gender Queer' and 'Fun Home,' which takes us to a nasty corner of queer theory," Super said.

What did board members say about the books selection process?

Several board members asked Searles clarifying questions. Board member Daniel Watson spoke of changing culture and shifting times. What was considered sensitive content decades ago isn't considered so anymore, he said.

Board vice chair Steve Triplett asked what the standard of review will be for books.

"It’s difficult in librarianship to define that," Searless said. Typically, each book will be reviewed individually before making the best decision possible, she said.

How did we get here?

Last month, school board chair Betsy Henderson asked Superintendent Jon Rysewyk for his staff to make a presentation on the process for challenging books and how librarians select books for schools.

"I want to be clear that I firmly believe in academic freedom and texts that challenge us," she said at the board's March meeting. However, she added, some books that were brought to the board's attention "are not challenging texts. Parents have come to us with books that contain sexually explicit imagery and that's not academic freedom. That's inappropriate content for minors."

"It's a complex subject," Rysewyk said at the March meeting. "As a father, I don't want my daughter to have access to that either ... but as an educator ... exposure to diverse ideas and viewpoints is part of education but we do need to make sure that it's age appropriate."

In November, Super stood before the Knox County school board and read a paragraph from "The Perks of Being a Wallflower," a 1999 young adult novel by Stephen Chbosky.

"We're not book banners. We just want to have some kind of policy that can label these books, segregate these books, have parental opt-out options or in the event that some of these are too graphic, be removed from the schools," Super said.

Triplett said at a December meeting he had a private discussion with Rysewyk about "administrative procedures" on book selections and the two had "agreed to disagree."

"I firmly believe that no minor in Knox County should be able to find books with sexually descriptive acts in our school library," Triplett said in December.

Book bans spread across the country

Nationwide, since 2021, school boards around the country have discussed and even implemented book bans, often because they have sexual references or LGBTQ+ or race-related issues.

A majority of the targeted books were written by or about a person of color, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, or a woman, according to reports released from the American Library Association and PEN America, a free speech advocacy group.

Incidents over the last two years have drawn national attention and scrutiny from advocates who say book bans are an attack on students' freedoms and constitutional rights. Educators and librarians have been put in the spotlight over book disputes, as some have faced attacks or threats for publicly defending access to these materials.

In neighboring Anderson County, residents asked for 17 books to be removed from public libraries last year. A library committee and the Anderson County Library Board read and reviewed the books and chose not to do so, although one book was moved to a section for older children.

The group behind the movement

Moms for Liberty, a far-right organization founded in 2021, defines itself on its website as a "grassroots organization of moms" that is "working to defend parental rights." The group's mission statement says it's "dedicated to fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government."

The Southern Poverty Law Center calls it a far-right antigovernment group.

The group's Knoxville chapter has a list of books that it finds inappropriate for minors and which schools have the books in their libraries.

Moms for Liberty uses a rating system developed by booklooks.org. That organization, separate from Moms For Liberty, has developed a system of rating books from 0 (books for everyone with no hate, no nudity and no profanity) to 5 (containing "aberrant" content).

USA TODAY contributed to this story.

Areena Arora, data and investigative reporter for Knox News, can be reached by email at areena.arora@knoxnews.com. Follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, @AreenaArora.

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Knox County Schools will form book review committees