The Francis Howell School District board voted Thursday to allow hate speech, false science and false historical claims in educational materials, a decision that alarmed some students, parents and teachers.
The school board approved the revised policy by a 5-2 vote. It reverses an amendment passed by the board in August that explicitly banned such content.
The board’s vice president, Randy Cook, introduced the measure, which also replaces 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.
During the meeting, Cook said he proposed the change to prevent viewpoint discrimination.
The policy will allow offensive speech and false information in books and curriculum, so long as the board deems them “educationally suitable.”
“The changes that are proposed here are based on guidance from our legal counsel,” Cook said. “I have every expectation that our educators will provide educationally suitable materials going forward, as they have in the past.”
Nathaniel Basset, a Francis Howell parent, said he doesn’t trust board members to consistently approve appropriate materials.
"How will they decide what should and shouldn’t be in our schools? The metric for their choice is educational suitability, which is yet to be defined,” Basset said. “The political stance of a book and the book’s content are often inextricably linked, making it nearly impossible to parse the school board's decision-making process. … This board’s book censorship plans are motivated by their orthodoxy and their ideology.”
Board director Steven Blair, who introduced the original amendment, said the new policy leaves room for false information, including climate change denial.
“This is a set of guidance that we give the teachers, and underneath the previous language, language that was approved last month, there are certain things that would just not be allowed,” Blair said. “The change could allow those to be included, but I'd rather it be clear about which views we're not interested in.”
The board left in place its August decision to ban books that contain references to alcohol and drug use, "explicit descriptions of sexual conduct” and repeated profanity.
The agenda of Thursday's meeting included the first list of books, provided as informational items. In August, the board’s 5-2 conservative majority voted to allow board members to remove any title from the list. Any district resident also can challenge a title. Those books would then require clearance from most board members before returning to the shelves.
In August, the board also approved a policy prohibiting teachers from discussing gender identity in the classroom.
Jamie Martin, a Francis Howell parent and member of the Francis Howell Forward Political Action Committee, opposes both policies.
“It’s our children who lose the most when they have to hide who they are and face constant slurs and discrimination,” Martin said. “Instead of leaving content decisions to librarians and parents, the board has turned to micro-managing, spending more time defining what is or is not appropriate on our shelves, than we do crafting boundaries on the hate speech our children hear.”
Board members on Thursday also denied several travel requests, preventing teachers from attending social studies and language arts conventions.
“Most of their content is very objectionable to me. … I think it’s ruining public education and driving people away from it,” Cook said. “I certainly don’t support any of our educators picking up these radical theories that are presented there.”
