In response to parents and community members concerns about the sexually explicit adult content in books found inside the Cameron high school, the superintendent and board of education decided to send all the parents “book restriction forms”. Parents are responsible for completing the form with the book title and author of every book they do not want their children to read, and to submit it to the school librarian. The librarian will then insure that child does not check out any of those books. Sounds good, right?
Unfortunately, there is no good tool for parents to use to identify the books in the library that contain sexually explicit adult content, or any other number of concerning topics. It is the sole responsibility of the parents to know the content of more than 33,000 books in order to restrict their child from reading books each parent deems inappropriate.
At a board of education meeting in August, the board members discussed the book restriction form and suggested we use a catalog search by topic or subject to find books we don’t want our children to read. What they didn’t tell you, searching the catalog by topic or subject isn’t very effective. We use the book The Bluest Eye and the Cameron school districts online book catalog for the high school to make this point.
If you are not familiar with the content of the book The Bluest Eye, you read the concerning content on Book Looks or hear a reading of some of its passages on our Facebook page. The book tells of the molestation of a 12 year old girl from the perspective of the man who is assaulting her. It is dark, and difficult to read. With that information, we will show the subjects listed in the catalog for this book in the video below. You will see why what the district is proposing, that parents are responsible for finding the content they added to our libraries, isn’t a viable option.
There just aren’t any good tools for parents to identify the concerning books. The school district knows this, but they want to say they’ve done something. They have, they’ve passed their responsibility for these books to the parents.