At the past two meetings of the USD 327 Board of Education [BOE], patrons raised complaints about a book, Perks of Being a Wallflower, used in a junior high classroom. Our BOE president and district superintendent stressed that procedures and policies are followed in the selection of instructional materials. As I continue here, readers may find those policies and procedures on the school website, www.usd327.org/documents. Click on USD 327 District Policies, then click on section (I) and scroll down to pages IF.

The first sentence reads, “All textbooks, instructional materials and the selection criteria for district media center materials shall be subject to board approval.” The policy continues to describe in some length the approval process. Based on the statements reported above and the policy, patrons may fairly assume that the book had been properly approved and that it represented no sinister attempt to warp the minds of young students.

The policy continues to lay out procedure for challenging instructional materials. The first step for a complainant requires a meeting with the principal and if the matter cannot be resolved, the process becomes much more complicated as detailed in the policy. Evidently, the matter was resolved.

A book that passed a preliminary review process, as described by BOE policy, was immediately removed from the classroom by the building principal at the behest of one or two complainants. No review process occurred as described in the BOE policy. If it did, it was not reported.

Instructional material selected under policy guidelines should have the benefit of the review process described in the policy before being removed. It should have the benefit of examination and evaluation as a whole.

Maybe allowing students to read Perks of Being a Wallflower was a mistake and it needed to be removed. Maybe not, no defense was offered, at least not publicly. A peremptory ruling prevailed. If we are going to have a policy that supports the removal of instructional material, let’s be sure to give the material a fair review first. Otherwise, we establish a precedent which opens the door to an assortment of complaints and the removal of valued instructional materials because they do not suit the preferences of a few individuals. Such a precedent does not bode well for the future of education in USD 327 and should be strenuously resisted.

Jerry L. Marsh

Ellsworth