By DAVID BOYLE
Anchorage School District has a committee that secretly meets to decide if certain pornographic books, which may be thinly disguised as “educational,” should be in the school libraries and available to children.
This district has the power to say what pornographic literature is “appropriate” for students at various age levels. Parents are not needed.
The formal process noted in its Administrative Regulation AR 6144(a) appears well written, but the process itself is secret, hidden from parents and everyone else.
If an individual complains about an obscene book at the school level, the principal and other school personnel decide if it should remain in that school’s library.
But if a person complains about an obscene book that is in several school libraries, then the complaint is heard by the secretive District Controversial Issues Review Committee.
Just who is on this committee? It is heavily weighted in favor of the school district. There are eight school district members, two student members, and three community members.
This is typical of the Anchorage School District, when it comes to committee make-up. It allows the district to say, “See, we had community involvement,” even though the token community committee members are outnumbered by district personnel.
Here’s the kicker: You will never know who the majority of these committee members are, nor will you know how they were selected.
When the former Deputy Superintendent Mark Stock consulted with counsel about this committee, counsel stated that providing names may inhibit the process from occurring.
Is keeping this committee membership secret more important than the public knowing the makeup of the committee?
The district may have understandable concerns about releasing student committee names. But the district seems to have few concerns about providing controversial pornographic books to those same students.
And the school board even shut down a parent when he read from one of the obscene books. The board doesn’t want to hear what is actually in one of these books when children are present.
Here’s the worst part: Minutes of the Controversial Issues Review Committee are not even kept. Should the community be able to know the results of their meetings and the discussion that ensued? Do parents and the public not have the right to know which pornographic books meet the “educational” goal and still contain graphic sexual information? What about the Alaska Open Meetings Act?
The vote of each committee member is also a secret that flies in the face of the district’s own accountability principle: “The District will be open, transparent and accountable to the public.”
The district may be in even deeper trouble than mere transparency problems. Alaska Statute AS 11.61.128, “Electronic Distribution of Indecent Material to Minors” has very specific prohibitions including: “the person knows that the material depicts the following actual or simulated conduct:
(A) sexual penetration;
(B) the lewd touching of a person’s genitals, anus, or female breast;
(C) masturbation;
(D) bestiality;
(E) the lewd exhibition of a person’s genitals, anus, or female breast; or
(F) sexual masochism or sadism; and
(3) the material is harmful to minors.
(b) In this section, it is not a defense that the victim was not actually under 16 years of age.
The superintendent, the school board and other school personnel, especially librarians, may be subject to providing indecent material to minors, a Class C Felony.
A final report from the “anonymous” secret committee is submitted to the person who challenged the material. That report also goes to the superintendent and the school board.
How that report is written and provided to the school board and the complainant without any meeting minutes is unclear.
The final report is also placed on the district’s controversial concerns website, which is three pages clicks down from the home page.
But first, one must know where to look. Don’t try to find information by putting your request in the ASD home page search bar.
If you try to search for the controversial concerns page on the ASD home page, you will get a blank page. Here it is:
So much for transparency about pornographic books.
After some page clicking and searching on the ASD web site, one can find the controversial concerns information. Here is the secret page, known as Page/19019: https://www.asdk12.org/Page/19019.
One book was challenged as inappropriate for students is “George/Melissa” a novel for middle school readers by Alex Gino.
The initial request for reconsideration was evaluated by an ad hoc committee that consisted of nine ASD employees and no community members.
The parent’s complaint said there were two references to child hormone therapy, two references to gender reassignment surgery, and the confusing use of pronouns throughout the book.
That district committee decided to retain the book in the school libraries, including elementary school libraries. The decision on the book can be found here.
The challenging parent then appealed the decision.
Here was his major concern: “How, specifically, is the notion of a student cutting of their own penis with scissors conveyed via gesture appropriate for an elementary student?”
Here is the committee’s response: “The reference to a scissor gesture in the groin area is not by the main character, but an older sibling.”
The committee would not even use the word “penis” in its rebuttal.
The secret committee disapproved the appeal and said that this book “is not pervasively vulgar” and that, “removal of the book from elementary schools would mean restricting access for the intended audience of the title.”
It should be noted that the book, by its own publisher, Scholastic, is meant for middle school students, but the ASD is placing it in elementary school classrooms and libraries.
What else is the Anchorage School District hiding from parents and the public? We know the district is hiding at least one student’s gender identity from parents. Are there other secret committees that help a child transition to a different gender?
You can read the entire secret committee report here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kBbBcvqxk7wHrabslpt9cCxsTbVrn16L/view
David Boyle is the Must Read Alaska education writer.
