Requesting that Book Removal Information be Available on the District Website

Dr. Megan Che

November 2023

I am Megan Che, a parent in the community and a tenured professor of mathematics education. I spoke at the last meeting and appreciate the chance to address the board again with some clarifications and follow-ups. 

As a reminder, my children have been in Anderson 4 since 2007. In my family, as in much of our diverse society, we have a robust range of racial and LGBTQ identities and experiences. Because of current, active efforts on the part of a few to restrict access district or statewide to educational materials, those of us working to ensure students’ rights to intellectual freedom are asking for access to information that is pertinent to our rights as parents and as community members.

Specifically, I am asking that our district leadership make information publicly available on our district website about the status of formal book challenges in our district. When I made this request at the last meeting, one of the potential ideas in response was to communicate formal book challenges through email. I am very glad that our district leadership seems to understand the importance of parents and community members having the information they need to secure students’ rights to intellectual freedom in a diverse democracy. However, communicating potential threats to intellectual freedom through email will only inform a subset of our community.

Our community has, in a broader sense, a definite stake in the quality and rigor of our public schools--as evidenced by the fact that certain decisions (like our recent bond issue, yay!!) about our district are brought to the entire community to decide. Our district currently makes publicly available a whole range of information about our public schools — which is an indicator of the seriousness with which our leadership takes its responsibility to be transparent and accountable to our community.

I am following up on my previous request to specifically ask that our district post on our website information about formal book challenges. This action, as I mentioned before, is already being undertaken in Pickens County, a school district with very similar bylaws, policies, and procedures to our district. Providing similarly detailed information on our website not just for current, active parents and guardians, but for the community would illustrate that our leadership, in whom we place much confidence and trust, understands the community-level vested interest in student intellectual freedom in our public schools.

Thank you again for the opportunity to speak and for everything you do for students in our district. I want to especially extend my gratitude to our school librarians for their efforts to uphold the crucially important value of intellectual freedom in support of our democracy.