Librarians gain protections in some states as book bans soar

Karen Grant and fellow school librarians throughout New Jersey have heard an increasingly loud chorus of parents and conservative activists demanding that certain books — often about race, gender and sexuality — be removed from the shelves.

In the past year, Grant and her colleagues in the Ewing Public Schools just north of Trenton updated a 3-decade-old policy on reviewing parents’ challenges to books they see as pornographic or inappropriate. Grant’s team feared that without a new policy, the district would immediately bend to someone who wanted certain books banned.

Around the same time, state lawmakers in Trenton were readying legislation to set a book challenge policy for the entire state, preventing book bans based solely on the subject of a book or the author’s background or views, while also protecting public and school librarians from legal or civil liabilities from people upset by the reading materials they offer.

When Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy signed that measure into law last month, Grant breathed a little easier.

“We just hear so many stories of our librarians feeling threatened and targeted,” said Grant, who works at Parkway Elementary School and serves as president of the New Jersey Association of School Librarians. “This has been a wrong, an injustice that needs to be made right.”

Amid a national rise in book bans in school libraries and new laws in some red states that threaten criminal penalties against librarians, a growing number of blue states are taking the opposite approach.

New Jersey joined at least five other states — California, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington — that have passed legislation within the past two years that aims to preserve access to reading materials that deal with racial and sexual themes, including those about the LGBTQ community.

Conservative groups have led the effort to ban materials to shield children from what they deem as harmful content. In the 2023-24 school year, there were 10,000 instances of book bans across the U.S. — nearly three times as many as the year before, according to a recent report by PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for literary freedom.

“Certain books are harmful to children — just like drugs, alcohol, Rated R movies and tattoos are harmful to them,” Kit Hart, chair of the Carroll County, Maryland, chapter of Moms for Liberty, a national organization leading the book banning effort, wrote in an email.

But some states are now safeguarding librarians and the books they offer.

“State leaders are demonstrating that censorship has no place in their state and that the freedom to read is a principle that is supported and protected,” said Kasey Meehan, director of the Freedom to Read program at PEN America, which has been tracking book bans since 2021.

The drive to ban certain books is not waning, however. While a handful of states fight censorship in school libraries, some communities within those states are attempting to retake local control and continuing to remove materials that conservative local officials regard as lurid and harmful to children.

‘Lives are in the balance’

The New Jersey measure not only sets minimum standards for localities when they adopt a policy on how books are curated or can be challenged but also prevents school districts from removing material based on “the origin, background, or views of the library material or those contributing to its creation.”

The law also gives librarians immunity from civil and criminal liability for “good faith actions.”

New Jersey state Sen. Andrew Zwicker, a Democrat who introduced the legislation, said until recently he thought that book bans were a disturbing trend, but one limited to other states. But early last year, he went to a brunch event and met a school librarian who told him she faced a torrent of verbal and online abuse for refusing to remove a handful of books with LGBTQ themes from her library’s shelves.

“That’s when I realized that I was so horribly mistaken, that these attacks on librarians and on the freedom to read were happening everywhere,” Zwicker told Stateline. “I went up to her and asked, ‘What can I do?’”

He said he’s already heard from lawmakers in Rhode Island who are considering introducing a similar measure this year.

A child who identifies with the LGBTQ community can read a memoir like “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe and feel seen for the first time in their lives, he said.

“I do not think it’s an overstatement to say that lives are in the balance here, that these books are that important to people, and that librarians are trusted gatekeepers to ensure that what’s on the shelf of a library has been curated and is appropriate,” Zwicker said.

These new state laws, several of which are titled the “Freedom to Read Act,” passed almost entirely along party lines, with unanimous Democratic support.

In New Jersey, Republican state Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia, who has worked in schools for the past 18 years, including as an English teacher, vehemently opposed the measure. She did not respond to an interview request.

“This isn’t puritanical parents saying, ‘Oh, I don’t want my child to learn how babies are made,’” she said during a September committee hearing. “That’s ridiculous, and we all know it.”

She added, “What I do want is for us to be able to have an honest conversation about some of what is in these texts that is extraordinarily inappropriate for that grade level.”

Enforcement and penalties

Legislation differs by state, including in enforcement and how to penalize noncompliant localities.

In Illinois, for example, school districts risk losing thousands of dollars in state grant funding if they violate the state’s new law discouraging book bans. But as the Chicago Tribune reported last month, that financial penalty was not enough to persuade many school districts throughout the state to comply, with administrators saying they are concerned about giving up local control on school decisions.

Several school districts in other states have similarly rebelled.

North of Minneapolis, St. Francis Area Schools’ board last month decided it would consult with conservative group BookLooks to determine which books it will buy for its school libraries. BookLooks uses a 0-through-5 rating system that flags books for violent and sexual content.

Under its rating system, books that have long had a place in school libraries — such as the Holocaust memoir “Night” by Elie Wiesel or “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou — would require parental consent to read.

Asked about the school district potentially violating state law, school board member Amy Kelly, who led the drive to use BookLooks, declined to be interviewed. Karsten Anderson, superintendent of St. Francis Area Schools, also declined an interview request.

In Maryland, Carroll County schools led the state in banning books in recent years, removing in the 2023-2024 school year at least 59 titles that were “sexually explicit,” according to a tally by PEN America.

Schools should not allow children to see “kink and porn,” wrote Hart, of Moms for Liberty. She got involved in the effort more than three years ago, saying she wanted to protect her five children and parents’ rights to make educational decisions.

She pointed to one book to make her point: “Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human,” a nonfiction book in graphic novel form by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan that seeks to educate teenagers about anatomy and consensual and safe sex. The book explores other issues of gender and sexuality, as well. Hart likened the book’s illustrations showing different ways of having sex to “erotica.”

“Parents who provide their children with alcohol or drugs, or to give them a tattoo would rightly be charged with crimes,” she wrote Stateline in an email. “Schools that provide children with sexually explicit content are negligent at best.”

The future of book bans

Around 8,000 of the more than 10,000 instances of banned books during the 2023-24 school year were in Florida and Iowa schools, according to PEN America. Lawmakers in those states enacted legislation in 2023 that created processes for school districts to remove books that have sexual content.

Iowa now requires that reading materials offered in schools be “age-appropriate,” while the Florida law ensures that books challenged for depicting or describing “sexual conduct” be removed from shelves while the challenge is processed by the district.

Some of those banned books included classics, such as “Roots” by Alex Haley and “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith.

Over the past year, lawmakers in Idaho, Tennessee and Utah passed measures that ban certain reading materials that deal with sex or are otherwise deemed inappropriate, according to a December report from EveryLibrary, an Illinois-based organization that advocates against book bans. Arizona Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed similar legislation in June.

Laws that allow for book bans have been the subject of several lawsuits in recent years, as plaintiffs argue those measures violate constitutional protections of free expression.

Late last month, a federal judge struck down parts of a 2023 Arkansas law that threatened prison time for librarians who distribute “harmful” material to minors. Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, a Republican, announced the state would appeal the decision.

EveryLibrary is tracking 26 bills in five states that lawmakers will consider this year that would target books with sexual and racial themes.

The organized effort to remove books because of LGBTQ or racial themes will continue, said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.

The association, which tracks book bans as part of its mission to support libraries and information science, found that most of the top banned books around the country had LGBTQ protagonists.

“Librarians have always been all about providing individuals with access to the information they need, whether it’s for education, for enrichment, for understanding,” she said in an interview. “Censorship is diametrically opposed to that mission.”