The first two actuations of the Redlands Unified School District’s policy allowing the removal of books from school libraries and classroom shelves is to take place next week.
On Tuesday, December 9, the same school board which on August 19 by a bare 3-to-2 majority voted to allow virtually anyone to challenge a book on the basis of its “explicit” content and have it temporarily removed while an evaluation of whether it should be permanently banned will consider the first two such challenges lodged.
The 3-to-2 school board majority in August approved both the library book policy and a similar one potentially banning explicit material from the district schools’ curriculum.
Under the library book policy, anyone who has knowledge about the presence of a particular book in any district school library can object to or challenge its “explicit” content, have the book in question within three days consequently temporarily taken out of circulation and then have it provided to a “district review committee” comprised of the superintendent, assistant superintendent of educational services and either the director of elementary or the director of secondary education. The district review committee then has two months to read and review the book using a numerical system ranking the book in question as to its sexual content, violence, social and educational context, suitability for the varying ages of students who have access to the library where it is available and the book’s potential for negative impacts on those reading it.
The district uses a somewhat idiosyncratic or subjective grading system in which the committee members rank 1 to 5 the intensity or unacceptability of the sexual content, violence; 1 to 5 the inverse value of the social and educational value of the content; 1 through 5 the age suitability of the content and 1 through 5 the potential for negative psychological harm, trauma or disruption to someone reading the book. Those books garnering a score of 1 to 10 are returned to the libraries shelves. Those which compile a score of 11 to 19 are moved to a library that furnishes books to students of a higher grade level or into a category of restrict access if they were already in a high school library. Those books achieving a score of 20 to 25, inclusive, are removed.
Two books in the school district’s libraries that came to the attention of members of the public who found them objectionable were The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Push by Sapphire.
Those books were removed from high school library shelves and have now been read by Superintendent Juan Cabral, Assistant Superintendent of Educational Services Patti Buchmuller and Director of Secondary Education Jean Joye.
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, published in 1970, has as its protagonist Pecola Breedlove, a young African-American girl living in Loraine, Ohio in the 1940s Ohio who has developed an inferiority complex as a result of both the trauma of being raped by her father who was himself the victim of sexual abuse in his youth and the beauty standards celebrated by the members of the predominantly white race that inhabit Loraine. She has grown mentally ill to the point that she has convinced herself that having blue eyes will make her beautiful and loved. The novel deals with the topics of racism, poverty, identity, and self-hatred, through the prism of Pecola’s delusional quest for blue eyes, and her hidden psychological desire to escape being black. Her experience pushes her into believing the world considers her ugly, and her means of escaping that overwhelming perception is to achieve a self-induced illusionary state in which she believes her brown eyes are blue.
Push is by Sapphire, published in 1996, recounting the experience of Claireece Precious Jones starting in 1987, when she is 16 years old and living in Harlem. Obese and illiterate, Claireece has already had one child, born with Down syndrome, fathered by her her father, Carl. That child has been placed into the care of her grandmother, though her parents are receiving welfare benefits for the child. The book has graphic passages which depict rape and incest as well as oral and vaginal sex with children. One passage in the book explicitly details Carl raping his daughter while his wife sleeps in the same bed. Claireece is again impregnated by her father, and when officials at the school she attends discover the pregnancy, she is sent to an alternative school. This is against her parents wishes, who prefer that she apply for welfare to take care of the baby instead of returning to school. At the alternative school, Claireece and some of the other students there develop a passion for literature, in particular that of African American writers such as Alice Walker, Langston Hughes and Audre Lord. At the hospital where she is giving birth to her second child, she tells a social worker that she had another child who is living with her grandmother. When this results in the welfare her mother and father are receiving being discontinued, she is kicked out of their house. She is accepted into a halfway house where she is free to return to school, and she does. She starts writing poetry and gets an award from the mayor for her literary accomplishments. Just as her life is going well, she learns her father has died from AIDs. She gets a test and learns she too is HIV positive but that her children are not. She joins a support group for those who are HIV-positive. In those meetings, she learns that many people, not just those who are black have had bad experiences like hers. The book ends with no indication of how Claireece is to do in life going forward.
The district released the reviews that Cabral, Buchmuller and Joye made of The Bluest Eye and filed on October 23. Without identifying them beyond their scorer identification code numbers of 1, 28 and 29, which is intended, apparently, to maintain some degree of confidentiality, those scores were 14 according to Scorer #1, 9 according to Scorer #28 and 14 according to Scorer #29. According to the summary given, the average score fell between 11 and 19 and any copies of The Bluest Eye previously at grade school or junior high libraries will be moved to high school libraries or be placed into the category of restricted access, presumably requiring parent permission to access it, at high school libraries.
Two of the reviewers of Push were given the same scorer identification code numbers of 28 and 29, while the other was given the code number of 2. Scorer #2, who completed the ranking of Push on October 16, rated it at 16. Scorer #29, who file the completed rating on October 17, put it at 14 on the scale and Scorer #29, on a scorecard dated October 17, ranked it at 19. Thus, copies of Push previously available from grade school or junior high libraries will be moved to high school libraries or be placed into the category of restricted access at high school libraries.
It appears that the school board next Tuesday will take action in accordance with the rankings Cabral, Buchmuller and Joye made, such that both The Bluest Eye and Push will be placed into the restricted materials collections at Redlands High, East Valley High and Citrus Valley High libraries and the library at the district’s continuation high school campus, Orangewood High.
Of some relevance and both real and academic interest will be whether, on this coming Tuesday, the two members of the school board who opposed the policy when it was first considered in June and then voted upon in July and August, Melissa Ayala-Quintero and Patty Holohan, vote to accept the recommendations from Cabral, Buchmuller and Joye that The Bluest Eye and Push be removed from general circulation at the district’s school libraries.
Earlier this year there was sharp disagreement between Ayala-Quintero and Holohan and their supporters on one side and the board coalition of Jeannette Wilson, Candy Olson and current Board President Michelle Rendler and the element of the community that sides with them on the other with regard to the library book policy.
Ayala-Quintero and Holohan, identify as Democrats and are considered progressives or liberals. Wilson and Olson, Republicans, meet the classic definition of conservatives. Rendler, who to casual observers seemed to be apolitical and pretty much middle-of-the-road in terms of her general approach prior to the 2024 election, was thrust into what became a swing vote position when Olson and Wilson were elected to the school board that November. Rendler did not prove as resistant to the direction that Olson and Wilson were seeking to move the district as those in the progressive camp would have liked and link up with Ayala-Quintero and Holohan to form a voting block to oppose actions Olson and Wilson championed such as banning the display of gay pride flags on campus and informing parents if their children assumed a different gender identity at school than that assigned them at birth. This resulted in Ayala-Quintero’s and Holohan’s supporters engaging in personal attacks on her, which did not have the desired effect of bringing her into union with the progressives but rather shoved her further into the conservative camp and thus created an alliance that included her, Olson and Wilson.
Olson, Wilson and their supporters that imposing limits on explicitly sexual references in the district’s schools curriculum was one that would prevent possible exploitation and grooming and that restrictions on the books available in the school’s libraries would protect students from sexually explicit books. Olson, in particular, said her survey of books in Redlands school libraries were disturbing and should not be available to impressionable kids, in particular without their parents’ consent. Olson’s and Wislon’s supporters have asserted that it is appropriate to have concerns about the potential impact sexually explicit and graphically violent reading material can have on young minds. They say that exposing some students to such material prematurely can be harmful, leading to desensitization, negative behavioral influence and violence. Some have argued that there are those who are actively militating to push what in years past were referred to as alternative forms of sexuality on unsuspecting students and that having certain materials in support of their objectives available in school libraries represents an unwanted intrusion into those students lives and ultimately a danger to their mental health. In addition, those to the right politically maintain, parents should have ample opportunity to be aware of and have control over what their children are being exposed to.
Those celebrating themselves as progressives argued that removing books from public school libraries goes against the grain of American values and comes close to violating or actually violates students’ First Amendment rights to access information and ideas. They say that restricting access to books will stifle intellectual growth and critical thinking and simultaneously prevent students from being exposed to to diverse perspectives. They have argued that there is already a sensible, sensitive and intellectually enriching monitoring of the materials that are available in school libraries carried out by highly-educated and trained librarians and educators who curate collections based on educational suitability and the school’s mission, who have the the professional expertise to know what kind of material will be of benefit to students. The progressives argue that the tendency of conservatives to ban books about marginalized populations such as lesbians, gays, bisexuals, queers and transsexuals can further stigmatize those groups, leading to negative mental health effects for those who just two generations ago were cataloged as mentally ill for merely being homosexuals or of any non-mainstream sexuality.
Liberals have turned the conservative argument about parental rights around, arguing that while some parents assert the right to decide what their own children read, no single parent or set of parents should have the right to restrict what books are available to the other students who attend school with their children.
In Redlands since before the policy was changed in August and even more so since it has been put in place, there are those who take issue with the mechanics, fairness and fuller implication of the system of book review that is now in place. The review process involves an unacceptable degree of subjectivity, they say. This is illustrated, they say, with the rating cards for The Bluest Eyes and Push, which call for rating “the severity and/or frequency of pornography, erotica, or detailed sexual acts” and “the severity and or frequency of sexual assault, coercion, or graphic violence tied to sexuality” and asks the scorer “Is the content gratuitous, or is it presented in a literary, historical, scientific or educational context?” Many American works of literature which have long been part of educational curricula in American schools, such as The Red Badge of Courage, A Farewell to Arms and The Great Gatsby depict what could be described as gratuitous violence and, at least in the case of The Great Gatsby, “graphic violence tied to sexuality.”
Moreover, if every parent of students attending schools in the Redlands Unified School District or one of every ten parents of students attending schools in the Redlands Unified School District or if one of every hundred parents of students attending schools in the Redlands Unified School District lodged a single complain about a book in the district’s libraries, the district superintendent, the district’s assistant superintendent of educational services, the director of elementary education and the director of secondary education would have time do nothing more but read books all day, most likely ones they would never otherwise so much as consider picking up, let alone reading.
-Mark Gutglueck