Webster, NY School District Rethinks Summer Reading List Criteria
RSSJoan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 05/23/2007
Sometimes, a book challenge can end up with the disputed book being withdrawn from the library’s collection. Here’s one challenge that resulted in a book returning to the library shelf—and back on the summer reading list.
In Webster, New York, the gay-themed Rainbow Boys (S&S, 2001) by Alex Sanchez, is back on the high school summer reading list (as well as the town’s public library shelf) following a parent’s 2006 complaint about the book’s explicit sexual content.
The re-shelving of Rainbow Boys follows a year-long self-examination by the Webster Central School District of its own procedures—an examination that resulted in the creation of criteria for book selection and a formal review process. Now, according to Jan Lutterbein, academic standards supervisor for grades 9 to 12, books placed on the summer reading list will be “read and judged according to American Library Association criteria, meaning it’s judged by its strengths, not its weaknesses, its whole, not its parts.”
The Webster district’s previous lack of criteria and procedure is what got the district into hot water in the first place, Lutterbein acknowledges. Books from the separate middle school and high school reading lists were shelved in close proximity at the library, leading a middle school boy last summer to select Rainbow Boys. The boy’s parent objected.
Following that challenge, the assistant superintendent of schools, now retired, pulled the book. “Her intention was to pull it aside and review it—not review it about ‘homosexuality,’ but because there was sexually explicit stuff in there,” Lutterbein explains.
Such fine points, unfortunately, were lost on the town’s rumor mill as well as the local press, Lutterbein says.
“Webster bans book” became the repeated headline in press coverage, the supervisor says. “The controversy was, ‘was it pulled off our list and banned?’ ‘Was it because of homosexuality?’ ‘Was it because of sexually explicit content?’ It kind of all got messed up in terms of who said what,” Lutterbein adds.
Last September she was directed to gather information from English and reading teachers and special education teachers, then form a voluntary committee composed of middle school, high school, and public librarians, along with teachers and a student. The committee then formulated a philosophical statement, criteria for selection, and a review process. The reading list was divided up according to maturity and reading levels.
And students were given strictures about reading off list. “It’s a little strict for someone in high school,” Luttenbein concedes, [but] “I guess that the goal is to help [students] make summer selections.”
