About a month into the school year, Lowcountry teachers and education advocates are unsure about the impact of new state regulations that require teachers to report all books and instructional materials used in their classrooms to an online database. Some fear the rule could lead to easier politically motivated book bannings.
State Regulation 43-170 passed the Statehouse and went into effect in July. The regulation aims to bring full uniformity related to the process of reporting concerns or complaints related to instructional materials other than those adopted by the S.C. Board of Education using the online database.
Instruction materials subject to the regulation include textbooks, books on teachers’ shelves, film strips, podcasts, internet materials and more. All must now be catalogued and listed on a public school’s website by individual staff members. The database will then be accessible by parents and guardians, and complaints can be filed electronically. Materials will then be reviewed by the district school board.
A slippery slope
Some say the vague language of the regulation could lead to sweeping book bans and censorship.
“It was originally meant to maintain age appropriateness of content, but it has not achieved that,” said Paul Bowers, director of communications for the ACLU of South Carolina. “Teachers and librarians came up to Columbia in the summer to warn the Board of Education that this would be a tool for book banning that the state was prepared to hand to groups like Moms for Liberty and similar groups that have popped up all over the state.
“What we’ve seen so far is chaos,” he added. “We’re getting reports from teachers and librarians now who have come back to school and are mostly unclear about what is and is not allowed under the new law.”
That uncertainty of what is “age-appropriate,” Bowers said, has led to school staff self-censoring their own classrooms out of fear of repercussions if the regulation is not followed properly.
“If teachers and librarians are saying, ‘Well, we are just going to have instructional materials related to state standards,’ then I think that would be OK,” said Charleston County School District board member Carol Tempel. “But books that could be about two dads and their kids, what are we going to do about books like that? Those are the kinds of books that the Moms for Liberty folks don’t want anything to do with.
“Based on the criteria, I think any teacher would be hesitant to have a story like that in their classrooms,” she added.
Bowers said the regulation is a part of a greater trend of right-wing political groups and individuals trying to assert control over the state’s education system.
“If you look at [state Superintendent] Ellen Weaver’s career trajectory, this is a person who has never worked at a public school a day in her life and has instead spent her time in a very insular bubble of right-wing think tanks,” he said. “Her work thus far in office has been to cut ties with teachers, to discredit their input and assert ideological control over what happens in schools. This is no kind of freedom.”
More on teachers’ plates
Teachers are required to have instructional materials logged by Oct. 11, according to Jody Stallings, president of the Charleston Teacher Alliance. And while teachers have known about the new regulations since the start of the school year, some are struggling to log the number of books they have in their classrooms.
“What I’ve been hearing is annoyance that teachers have to take the time to catalogue these books themselves,” Stallings said. “It’s just one more step toward an inevitable breaking point. I’ve heard from elementary school teachers who have a hundred or so books, and they have the smallest planning periods, and the most courses, and they don’t have students who can help them with the task. It has not hit all teachers equitably.”
In addition to classrooms, instructional materials in school libraries have to be catalogued as well, Tempel said.
CCSD Trustee Darron Lee Calhoun II said Sept. 9 that district leaders had no choice but to implement the policies to align with the state regulation, despite several trustees not wanting to. Specific policies will be further discussed at the next board meeting on Oct. 2.
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