The Higley Unified School District Governing Board last week reviewed a selection process for a committee of district personnel and parents that will review novels assigned to students by teachers.
The discussion comes after some Higley parents objected to the content of novels being assigned to their children in some classes and complained they did not get permission slips when the materials were assigned.
Brittany O’Neill, a Williams Field High English teacher, spoke at an August board meeting, stating that a parent of a child in her Honors Multilingual Literature class had been threatening legal action against her for the books she assigned.
Many other Higley parents and students came to her defense in the same meeting, with calls to respect the teacher’s judgment and to allow the high schoolers to broaden their world view by reading the novels.
Last month, Gilbert Police opened an investigation on O’Neill after the parent lodged an official complaint on the matter.
The district had previously updated its permission slips that allow a parents to demand a substitute assignment for a novel they found objectionable by indicating their reasons through checkboxes.
The parents have two weeks from the date of receiving the slip from their children to read and review the material assigned.
Simultaneously, the district updated procedures to for selecting community members to serve on a novel-review committee and its objectives in selecting books.
In the meeting last week, Mary Davis, Higley’s director of professional development, broke down the steps the district took to select a committee that will review books for students in grades 6 through 12. People could apply in August.
“Each school was provided with a snippet of information to include in their newsletter that they sent out over that time period, giving us a reach of over 15,000 people, which earned us 94 applicants – which was a much higher number than what I was expecting,” she said.
There are two eligibility criteria that the applicants must fulfill in order to be considered for selection. First, they must be a HUSD teacher, district office staff member, HUSD administrator, HUSD parent or legal guardian or a community member living within the district boundaries.
Applicants must also commit to reading a novel every four to six weeks and be open to complex works that might not be their usual preference.
According to Davis, seven members of the district’s educational services then randomly selected applications for each of the four stakeholder groups – district office staff, parent/legal guardian/community members, site administration and teachers.
The 28-member committee comprises one site administrator, three district office staff, 10 teachers and the remaining 14 are parents, legal guardians or Higley community members.
Davis chairs the committee and Shauna Miller, the district’s executive director of special education, serves as the co-chair.
Davis clarified that she and Miller are not participating in the novel selection process and their role is to merely facilitate the group with its work.
The committee members are expected to read the materials that are sent for review and provide recommendations for the board and the superintendent to approve.
The updated policy also states that recommended texts will be available for public inspection at the district office for at least 60 days before the board meets to approve and adopt them.
Information about the proposed texts will also be available on the HUSD website.
Davis said that the novel review committee had already met once last month to set expectations and provide the members with all the information and novel rubric to guide them in their reviews.
She also had received book requests which were assigned and will be discussed on Oct. 23 by the committee.
The same process was followed for the PreK-12th supplemental material review, which met Sept. 25, Davis said.
“The members are all very eager to get their hands into the work and start reviewing material,” she said.
Board member Anna Van Hoek, who had reviewed the final committee member list, said that out of the 28, 17 seem to be staff members and only 11 are from the parent stakeholder group.
“That was concerning for me. I do want it to be equal as far as the different categories,” she said.
Van Hoek also wanted to know if the committees had been properly appraised about the state statutes governing the selection of the educational materials.
She asked the board to add a future agenda point to discuss all laws and statutes regarding curriculum and book selection as well as the board’s process of approving the materials.
Davis explained that while there may be Higley teachers who are also parents, the teachers selected in their specific group would not serve the dual role of parents within the committee.
She also said that the novel committee’s first meeting covered the state statute on sexually explicit materials, prohibitions, exemptions and definition of the educational materials.
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