Greenville County Schools will resume hosting book fairs in January after temporarily pausing them in August.
Tim Waller, the district’s director of media relations, explained in a statement that book fair vendors must sign a form acknowledging they have reviewed and will comply with the regulation and provide schools with a list of books that might be in the book fair at least four weeks in advance.
Media specialists will then vet the books, and a list will be shared with parents and guardians in advance. Students must have a signed permission form to attend the book fair. Multiple book vendors have agreed to the process, and more are anticipated to be added, Waller said.
More:Greenville County Schools to ‘pause’ book fairs after new rules mandated in South Carolina
The new rules were established after a state regulation mandating books not “age and developmentally appropriate” be removed from classrooms and school libraries. The pause on the book fairs allowed the district time to come up with a solution to continue holding them in the future, Waller said.
“The logistics of book fairs involve large containers of books and other material being delivered to schools, set out, packed up, picked up, restocked, and sent to the next school on a short turnaround time,” Waller said in August. “It is not possible for school personnel to vet all book fair content after it arrives, nor can vendors provide accurate content information far enough in advance for it to be vetted through the district prior to the start of fall book fairs.”
In June, the state’s Board of Education passed a regulation banning books “for any age or age group of children if it includes descriptions or visual depictions of ‘sexual conduct.’”
The state’s Department of Education said that across the state, parents, educators and administrators are grappling with decisions about what books are allowed in classrooms or libraries and are only made more challenging due to not being “governed by any consistent definitions, clear standards, or statewide uniform process.”
The new regulation, the department said, aims to aid this by creating a “two-prong threshold test for local educators and boards to determine if materials available to students in public schools are (1) age and developmentally appropriate and (2) educationally suitable and aligned with the purpose of South Carolina’s instructional program.”
The department also argued that the new regulation was not equivalent to book banning or censorship.
“A book ban is when the government seeks to prevent you from buying, selling, owning, or reading a book. This regulation doesn’t do that. Students are still free to buy, own, and read any book that they or their parents choose, and there’s no penalty to discourage them from doing so,” the district wrote in an executive summary.
The state’s chapter of the ACLU called the regulation “overbroad” and argued it would “lead to a surge of book-banning attempts.”
“South Carolinians are less free today than they were yesterday. By crafting and promoting a broad new book-banning policy, Superintendent Ellen Weaver has handed a blunt instrument to her ideological allies in the pro-censorship lobby. We still believe in academic freedom and will fight tooth and nail alongside teachers, librarians, students, and parents against the ongoing campaign of harassment and intimidation in public schools and libraries,” Executive Director of ACLU of South Carolina Jace Woodrum said in a statement in June.
Savannah Moss covers SC government/politics for the Greenville News. Reach her at [email protected] or follow her on X @Savmoss.
This post was originally published on here
