If you have seen the news from Urbandale School District this week about the list of books they say need to be reviewed due to the new school library book policy, then it’s important you read my newsletter this week to get the facts and the full picture.
ICYMI
For those of you who haven’t been following this issue, let me get you up to speed. This session, we passed a bill to ensure that all books in Iowa school libraries are age appropriate. In recent years, Iowans have found examples of pornographic material in their children’s school libraries. And shockingly, some Iowa school districts have been reluctant to remove them, resulting in the Legislature stepping in to pass a new standard.
What’s Actually in the Bill
We were very careful in how we crafted this legislation. Our bill stated that age appropriate does not include any material with descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act. A sex act is already defined in Iowa code. I apologize for the graphic nature of this next paragraph, but it’s important to know exactly what is in the bill.
A sex act is defined, in part, as: “penetration of the penis into the vagina or anus; contact between the mouth and genitalia or by contact between the genitalia of one person and the genitalia or anus of another person; contact between the finger or hand of one person and the genitalia or anus of another person.”
This week, Urbandale School District released a list of books they believe need to be reviewed and possibly removed from school libraries due to this new policy. Their list is, I believe, purposefully overbroad to make a political point. I think our Education Chairman Skyler Wheeler explained this issue quite well. Here’s what he had to say:
“The Education Committee worked very carefully to craft this legislation. Anyone who has actually read the bill and read the definition in the bill for a sex act knows that the Urbandale School District is just playing a political game with their recently released list of books. It’s unbelievable to me that some of these school districts are having such a hard time removing sexually explicit material from their library. This is quite simple to me. Porn doesn’t belong in school libraries. Books that don’t contain porn can remain on the shelves.”
Remember the bill states that books that have graphic descriptions or images of a sex act do not belong in schools. After reading the definition of sex act, I hope you can clearly see that the Urbandale School District’s list contains many books that do not fall under this new standard.
Our intention is simple. We want pornographic materials out of school libraries. I still cannot understand why these urban and suburban school districts disagree.
