Of Books and School Boards

This spring local elections will fill seats on school boards for the Flatonia, Schulenburg, La Grange, Round Top-Carmine, and Fayetteville School Districts. These ISD board members are the ones entrusted with assuring that our schools are delivering an excellent education to our kids.

All residents here, these are our neighbors: doctors and dentists, lawyers and engineers, farmers and ranchers, bankers and morticians, hair stylists and pharmacists, insurance agents and nurses, pastors and business owners, non-profit heads and retirees, contractors and service station owners. NONE OF THEM ARE PAIDADIMETO DOTHISWORK on our behalf. Some of them have college educations and advanced degrees; some ended their schooling with high school diplomas; some of them have kids enrolled in the schools now, others had children in school when first elected, but there is no requirement to have children at all, nor to have them enrolled in public school if the board member has kids.

Just what sort of training do school board members receive once they are elected? The Texas Education Agency website indicates 27 hours of training in the first year of service, some done locally, some on-line, and some at regional service centers; after year one, there is at least another 12 hours per year of required continuing education, with more in years following legislative sessions where changes are made to the education code by the State Legislature. So in a six-year term, each member would have given up at least 87 hours (not counting travel time) in training/continuing education, or over two 40-hour weeks’ worth of work time, PLUS all the school board meetings (generally monthly at least) and all the time needed to study the meeting materials ahead of time (often multiple files of paperwork that would stack up more than two or three inches if printed out on both sides.)

And what thanks do these folks get? Little if any, I fear. And this brings me to one great concern over the arguments we are having locally about book banning. I respect the individuals who asked to have the four books removed from the order list: I regard them as caring people who are generous, thoughtful, faithful, and trust-worthy. While I don’t agree with them on this matter, I deeply respect their right to ask for this consideration of their concerns. I have some fears that this national book-banning movement is a smoke screen to distract us from more important issues we ought to be confronting as a country and as a society, but I would never believe that the board members who asked these books to be removed were acting out of anything but genuine concern for the welfare of the children whose education they oversee. I hope none of us will vilify them for this (even as I wish they had first read the books they want to ban).

My other big concern is the kids, some of whom had no doubt finished reading every book in their school library last May already. When will they see new books? These four books (and presumably others that have been challenged that were already in the libraries at LGISD) will be studied by a district committee. Three of the members of the La Grange ISD book reconsideration committee will be randomly chosen from people who want to serve. There will be four other members, three from the school district, and one from the voting constituency at large, with an eighth person (non-voting) serving as moderator/convener. The names of this group are to remain confidential, and they will make a recommendation to the school board, which will act then on each of the books.

What a long, time-consuming process, for books that kids are waiting impatiently for, in some cases. What a tedious micromanagement exercise for books that have already been vetted by multiple national library resource centers and book awards committees staffed by doctoral or masters’ degree-holding library and reading specialists, who have screened the books already for prurient or obscene content, rejecting those that would be inappropriate for the grade level they are written for. Books are not ordered without the local librarians also reading reviews by those professional screeners, and then considering what their kids are checking out the most, what they are asking for, and what they’re most enthusiastic about reading.

Please, let’s give the “eager-reader” kids a chance at all the new books their diligent professional librarian- educators can afford to order, before they go through still another year of “No, not yet!” responses from those librarians when the kids ask, “Aren’t any of the new books in yet???”

Thanks for reading The Fayette County Record and books, Dear Readers. Let’s pray for God’s blessings of forgiveness, compassion, wisdom, and good humor for all who express heartfelt opinions about books, and YES: I know I am surely among that group needing forgiveness, too.