Karen Grant and fellow school librarians throughout New Jersey have heard an increasingly loud chorus of parents and conservative activists demanding that certain books — often about race, gender and sexuality — be removed from the shelves.
In the past year, Grant and her colleagues in the Ewing Public Schools just north of Trenton updated a 3-decade-old policy on reviewing parents’ challenges to books they see as pornographic or inappropriate. Grant’s team feared that without a new policy, the district would immediately bend to someone who wanted certain books banned.
Around the same time, state lawmakers in Trenton were readying legislation to set a book challenge policy for the entire state, preventing book bans based solely on the subject of a book or the author’s background or views, while also protecting public and school librarians from legal or civil liabilities from people upset by the reading materials they offer.
