Questions book “challenges” at GASD

Editor’s note: Assistant Dean and Director of Scholarly Communications at Gettysburg College’s Musselman Library Janelle Wertzberger presented this statement to the Board of Directors regarding the Gettysburg Area School District’s proposed new policy on library materials on Tuesday evening.

My name is Janelle Wertzberger. I currently have one child in the district and another is an alumnus of GAHS. I am also a professional librarian with over 25 years of experience in academic libraries.

This board has been engaged in conversations about how to restrict student access to books. Not whether they should restrict access, but how. I am here to state clearly that I do not support restricting access to books in our school libraries. Children and young adults have First Amendment rights just like all of us, and that includes the right to access information from their library.

That said, parents have the right to guide their own children’s use of library materials. They do not have the right to restrict other children’s access, and I am relieved that this board does not seem motivated to censor information by banning books from our shelves altogether. That would be patently wrong.

The proposed revision of GASD Policy Manual’s Code 109 regarding Library/Media and Resource Material Selection includes an alarmingly vague statement that “The Superintendent or Designee will develop a procedure to allow parents to have the option to limit access to ‘challenged books.’”

This “procedure” is going to be costly. Why? Because libraries are made to share information, not to restrict it. Our open bookshelves and displays reflect this value. Our integrated library systems reflect this value. Our user services reflect this value. Any procedures designed to work against these core values will necessarily be costly in terms of staff time, money, and human relationships.

The proposed initiative will require high effort on the part of staff and administrators. High effort initiatives that result in high impact are fine, but this is not that kind of project. It will have little impact, because as amazing as libraries are, they are only one information node in today’s society. Perhaps you will keep some students from accessing some titles, but there are many other ways for young people to get them. Do we really want to devote a lot of staff time and taxpayer money to prop up the fiction that we can block information from young people? We cannot. And we should not.

Local efforts behind this proposed change are fixated on the so-called “challenged books list,” a list of titles that are most often challenged in U.S. libraries. These titles are challenged for a wide variety of reasons, so using the list as a guide for what to limit is bizarre. The list includes works by authors who have won prestigious awards including the Newbery Award, the Printz Award, the Nobel Prize, the National Book Award, and more. It also includes The Holy Bible. Fixating on this particular list is a slippery slope toward more and more restrictions. I think we know how that story ends, because Ray Bradbury wrote it in Fahrenheit 451.

If parents want to control what their students read, let that be a family issue handled within the home. It should not be an issue in the libraries of our public schools.