Efforts to remove pornography from the government schools continue but viewpoints on how the process is working vary.

School Board Member Melody Bolduc is pleased, citing as one reason that media specialists are identifying bad books before others who are working on the problem.

Activist Blake Harper is less pleased. He began an effort to review books, recruiting people to examine library books and identify those that do not seem to conform with Florida law.

To date, 46 have been challenged by Harper’s group but the challenges have not been processed, Harper said.

He complained to the school district’s chief academic officer, who told him the target date to process the challenges was Aug. 21.

The people, through the legislature, have said they want inappropriate material removed from school libraries.

On the district’s website, it says: “As required by state law, Duval County Public Schools certified media specialists review all books in school media centers and classroom libraries.” 

As of Aug. 14, there were 59 titles on the list of those found unsuitable.

It simply is illogical to think that Clay County, a smaller district, would have hundreds of inappropriate books while Duval had almost none.

Challenges from outside the system run through a book review process established by the board last year. It relies on a committee of volunteers acting on guidelines set by the board.

Pro-pornography forces haven’t been able to defeat the law, so they rely on delay.

The board’s guidelines build delay into Duval’s process.

Harper says it is because the board chose the wrong standard from among several that have been used in Supreme Court decisions.

The guidelines require a book to be read from cover to cover, even if many passages of pure pornography, violence or other obviously objectionable material have been found.

This, according to those who favor the process, is to put inappropriate excerpts in the book in “context,” in the event that it has great literary value overall.

The example used is Huckleberry Finn, which uses the word “nigger” more than 200 times but overall is an acknowledged literary classic.

The odds of finding an unrecognized literary work on the order of Huckleberry Finn on the shelves of local government schools is about the same as winning the Powerball with one ticket.

It isn’t just a local matter.  the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ recent ruled that an Arkansas law restricting minors’ access to “harmful” library material is indeed constitutional. Based on the law, Arkansas librarians who promote sexually explicit content to minors may face criminal charges. 

Finding suspect books isn’t rocket science and doesn’t require laboriously reading every word of every book in every library. There are databases of books that already have been challenged and found to be unsuitable. It makes sense to start by determining whether any of those books are in the local system.

The library database used by the district was a mess, but the district is in the process of moving to a different system.

There is no requirement for the district personnel to report how many books they examine each month and the titles.

Why not?

If the bureaucracy of a school district wanted defeat by delay, as favored by pro-porn liberals, they could claim a lack of personnel or waste time by reading books they know are acceptable, while ignoring those they know are not.

It is up to the board members to make the process work. They should require periodic reports from the staff on how many books have been reviewed and explain delays. The board should reconsider requiring all books to be read thoroughly.

Let the pro-porn forces continue to rail about imaginary “book bans” but get the process moving and bring Duval County into compliance with both the law and the wishes of parents.

Government schools across the nation are fighting this battle because most also people favor age restrictions on books. At least 85% believe that books can be inappropriate for young children. Even more (90%) say that sexually explicit content has no place in school libraries,

Do what is right for the children.