It's Banned Book Week

Resources, books, and the dirt on my speech to the school board

It’s Banned Books Week, and I’m fired up again about shennanigans in school board meetings in my town. Last March a Moms for Liberty-ish group of parents tried to ban a trans-centered middle grade book from our district classrooms and get the teacher who read it to her class fired.

I joined about 100 kids and parents in our district to show up and speak out, and the group (and the board member who represents them) backed down. In response to that attempted book ban I designed the image above, wrote a blog post, and put a resource page on my website with a list of some of the most popular banned books, as well as places to find information about stopping the bans in your district.

You can find those resources here.

In my Kick-Ass Heroines newsletter this week, I talked about some big picture ideas about culture shifts that happen one conversation at a time. In this parenting newsletter I’ll give you the dirt about all the things that prompted that post, since it relates to schools, parenting, and the lessons we teach our kids.

The community I live in is affluent, mostly white, and our schools are rated straight 10s on a 1-10 scale of excellence. My only interaction with the school board used to be when board members occasionally came to events my kids participated in. But that changed in 2020 when a small, very vocal group of parents stood up against mask mandates, and lobbied hard for the reopening of our schools despite a Statewide shutdown. That group now seems to be targeting LGBTQ+ students and staff with complaints about books written by trans authors, a transgender substitute teacher, and now, the confidentiality of our Student Support plan designed to accommodate name and pronoun change requests.

I considered my approach carefully, wrote and rewrote both public comment and speech, and did a fair amount of research into our district’s budget, several Federal lawsuits, and our State’s education code. I have found that impassioned speeches about feelings are far more easily dismissed than logical discussions of lawsuits and the potential cost to our budget. I’ve realized that its far more common than not to encounter people who just don’t give the issue much thought. Transgender and non-binary people may not have been part of their personal landscape, which allows the public narrative – whatever the media or people around them say is true – to create their bias. Focusing my first arguments on the money engages my intended audience (because everyone’s worried about district spending, and everyone has a bias about where money should go). Then, because every school and district official at a school board meeting is there because they care about the education of kids, reminding them that the kids are listening throws the emotional punch that may actually land.

At the school board meeting in question there were seven public speakers on non-agenda item topics – six of them wearing pink t-shirts, and me. I have no idea what the pink t-shirts signified, but it was clearly an organized effort. I made sure my comment card was the last to be handed in so I would be the final speaker, and then I sat through six speeches which included dog whistle words like “pedophile” and “groomer.” I didn’t think to have “communist” on my bingo card for the night, but that one got trotted out too.

My speech directed the board’s attention to the lawsuit we would certainly face from our State’s Attorney General if we removed the confidentiality from our Student Support plans, continued through what we’d already spent in legal fees and settlements (obtained from careful examination of the district budgets), and ended with this:

“I will not debate the ethics or morality of transgender rights – for me they are absolute – and certainly not with anyone who questions, for even a second, any human being’s rights to full and complete protection under the law. I will tell you this – our students see, and hear, and feel every one of these comments you’re making, and these attacks on the LGBTQ+ community that you’re couching in “parental rights” and “concerns for the children” need to stop.” – April White

The issue, unfortunately, still has the potential to be ongoing as one Board member did request to add it to the agenda. There is still time to impress upon the others the dangers of doing so – the media circus it would draw to our district, and even more damaging, the bigotry our kids would see and hear from the loud minority who seem to have no trouble talking about transgender and non-binary kids as “confused,” “damaged,” or “at risk from pedophile teachers.”

There will be more to this story, but for now, I am satisfied with the “thank you for doing this, Mom” I got from the 20-year-old, and the “Nice speech,” I got from the 16-year-old. My kids have seen me stand up to bigots, and it’s a pretty good lesson to teach.