The Francis Howell school board on Thursday will vote on a policy amendment that would allow hate speech, false science and false historical claims in educational materials. The change would reverse a vote the board took in August that banned such content.
The board’s vice president, Randy Cook, also wants to replace language in the policy that called for presenting "all points of view" on international, national and local issues with language that calls for a wide variety of views. In an email statement, Cook said the ban on offensive language and false information “could be considered viewpoint discrimination.”
“Hate speech is a very broad term. It means different things to different people,” Cook said at the board meeting in August. “False science… you can get into some very heavy discussions. …Is climate change real? You’re giving some administrators the determination to decide.”
But school board member Steven Blair said he introduced the current policy to prevent students from being misinformed.
“The phrase ‘the Holocaust is a hoax,’ would currently not be allowed and presented as a valid view,” Blair said. “If these changes take place, it could be.”
Greg Magarian, a law professor at Washington University, said the proposed change would allow board members to “preserve their discretion.”
“These decision-makers are governed by the First Amendment, but they are also operating in a context where, necessarily, they are having to make decisions that some speech is better than other speech,” Magarian said. “The thing they're dodging is just the specificity and the potential conflicts. ... They figure, ‘We can probably make more prudent, rational decisions.’”
In August, school board members voted to require board approval for every new book purchased or donated to the district. That policy allows the board, which has a conservative majority, to decide whether a book is educationally suitable.
“It isn't clear what parameters they would use to determine educational suitability,” Blair said. “Whereas hate speech, false science, false historical claims … experts can clearly see what those words mean.”
Jamie Martin, a Francis Howell parent and member of the Francis Howell Forward Political Action Committee, has said board members are intruding on curriculum standards set by educators.
“The bulk of the changes expand the power of these politically elected officials of the school,” Martin said at the meeting in August. “And then limit the autonomy of students and teachers. We're giving more power to an oversight body that has no requirement to have any education or training.”
If the policy amendment passes, "hate speech, false science, and false historical claims” would be allowed in educational materials — but books would still be banned for containing alcohol and drug use, "explicit descriptions of sexual conduct” and repeated profanity. The school board voted in August to ban that content.
The agenda of Thursday's meeting will present the first list of books as informational items so that board members can determine if there are any they want to discuss before they are approved, in accordance with a policy they approved in August. Any district resident can challenge a title. Those books would then require clearance from most board members before returning to the shelves.
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the process by which the school board will be presented with a list of books they may want to consider for discussion before approving them.
