A federal judge has overridden the wishes of a local school district in Alaska. From now on, federal judges will say what books can be in schools, and what books cannot.
Judge Sharon Gleason of the U.S. District Court of Alaska ordered that the Mat-Su Borough School District return all but 7 of the 56 books it removed in April 2023 to its shelves by Aug. 14.
The district had implemented a review committee to review and debate the merits of books that had been challenged by parents for appropriateness for various age levels.
Judge Gleason, known as an extremely liberal judge, said the review process amounts to official suppression of ideas and she doubted the constitutionality of the process, by which a committee assembled by the school board reviewed the books in what not an arbitrary or capricious way.
The school district had returned several books to the shelves on its own, after the committee reviewed them at the request of parents.
The judge has said that seven books can be removed from circulation entirely. If the district wants the other books to be removed, it will have to give the judge a written reason within a few days.
The issue is this: Do school districts have the right to curate library materials or must they include only the books that this judge says are OK?
Savannah Fletcher, who is running for Senate, was the attorney for the Northern Justice Project, which challenged the school district. She and the ACLU say the school district has no right to remove any books from school libraries, no matter what.
“The court’s decision today affirms free speech and First Amendment rights that all Alaskans are afforded under the law,” said Ruth Botstein, Legal Director for the ACLU of Alaska. “Alaska students do not benefit when ideas are censored. This is a win for young people in our state.”
Generally school libraries have had to be sensitive to not putting pornographic or books with satanic themes in the stacks, but now a judge has supplanted the reasoning of the local people.
The books that Gleason said can be removed are: Call Me By Your Name, Verity, It Ends With Us, Ugly Love, A Court of Mist and Fury, A Court of Silver Flames, and You.
