Recently I was made aware of a website that tracks inappropriate books in public school libraries. You can take a look for yourself here via Take Back the Classroom. Put in your city and even your school and see how many books they found in your area. We did that for Bartlesville and found the site listed 165 explicit/inappropriate books in our school libraries. This is my story on what several of us did after that.
I had already been trying to schedule a meeting with my school board representative for several months unsuccessfully, and to make matters worse she is a neighbor in my precinct. I suggest you see if your school board representative is accessible too. Then I communicated with our School Board President and cc’d my rep on the board about the explicit books and asked that he have them removed. He basically replied that any parent of any student could opt out their child from access to any book in the school libraries. Can you believe that totally inadequate reply!
After that complete failure of accountability, Eddie Collins and I met with one of the local administrators to find out what more could be done to get these books removed. We presented him of a list of the explicit and inappropriate books potentially found in Bartlesville schools. You can do this for your school district as well (see link above). Here is a summary for Bartlesville:
Here are the books by school with their counts totaling 165.
Bartlesville High School – 53 books found
BHS Freshman Academy – 79 books found
Central Middle School – 14 books found
Madison Middle School – 18 books found.
Wilson Elementary School – 1 book found.
I don’t know about you but one book is way too many and you would think that once notified of this problem our local school administrators and board would have taken it upon themselves to instantly review these books for appropriateness and removal from our local school libraries. That however would not be the case. In our meetings with local administrators, they did conduct an audit from our lists and did not find but 140 of the books mentioned in the libraries and available to students which means some of those are still available to staff. I have not received permission to publish that audit, but I assure you we are not finished with this matter.
The next school board meeting for Bartlesville is on September 15th at 5:30PM at 1100 SW Jennings Avenue. Please plan to attend and speak on this topic if it is of a concern to you. For those around the state, please see if you have the same problem we do and let’s make sure our public school libraries are academic in focus and not full of inappropriate content for students.
Eddie Collins and I are active in the Washington County Republican Party and the Oklahoma Chapter of Mass Resistance. Both are great ways to get involved on matters to help stop this nonsense. Links to both are provided so that you can reach out and volunteer your help. We need you involved and speaking out!
Special thanks to Take Back the Classroom for their research and efforts in this matter. They fought taxpayer funded porn in California and have an excellent blog article on that battle here: https://tbtcblog.squarespace.com/tbtcblog/vote-no-huntington-beach
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