Alabama State Department of Education (ALSDE) Superintendent Erick Mackey said at a Thursday meeting that he would encourage school superintendents to adopt policies for challenging school library books.
Libraries have shot to the forefront of Alabama’s political discourse, with sexually explicit books in public and school libraries raising public concern in recent months.
According to Mackey, local school superintendents are being encouraged to adopt policies for concerned parents to challenge specific books that might be objectionable. He also said one school system has independently decided to audit its elementary books to check for inappropriate materials.
“We’ve not really heard any issues,” Mackey said. “There is one school district that has launched their own sort of internal audit; they’re just going through all their elementary libraries and evaluating their collections to see if they feel like they have anything. Not that parents are challenging it, but anything they wanted to kind of basically challenge for their own administration to just check. It’s one of our very large systems with a lot of elementary schools. So they are doing…
