Recently obtained documents showed that at least one South Carolina school library restricted access to its online card catalog in order to keep parents from finding out about “critical race theory books” used in the school curriculum.
The information emerged following a freedom of information request by the parental rights group Moms for Liberty.
“Instead of listing these books as available in the library, they are making a conscious decision to include them in curriculum read aloud in class so parents don’t know,” Carly Carter, chair of the Anderson County Moms for Liberty chapter, said in a written statement to the Daily Signal on March 13.
According to the school district, all school catalogs are required to be unlocked at the beginning of the school year. According to Ms. Carter, however, one of the catalogs remained inaccessible until well into February.
Ms. Carter said that this appears to be a concerted effort to cut parents out of the decision-making process.
“What’s most insulting here is that their intention is to cut parents out. They want to expose children to a social curriculum that they don’t want their parents to know anything about. That’s appalling,” she said.
A March 2022 e-mail written by Jennifer Chesney, the librarian at Powdersville High School in Powdersville, South Carolina, showed that the card catalog was removed deliberately in order to prevent parents from having knowledge of its content.
“We had to remove our card catalogs from online, so parents can’t scour it for critical race theory books (sigh),” according to the email.
Critical race theory (CRT) promotes the idea that the United States is an inherently racist country that favors white people over black people. The ideological basis serves to facilitate a division, which has led many parents to question it, saying it makes black students feel oppressed while instilling “white guilt” in white students, leaving them to feel ashamed of being the “oppressor.”
The e-mail was sent after some parents requested copies of Ron Jones’ book “The Acorn People.” A subsequent e-mail was sent by Ms. Chesney in June of 2023, in which she cautioned about Moms for Liberty challenging certain materials that the group deemed inappropriate and mentioned that her school district has a “really weird climate right now with books.”
“The Moms of Liberty are coming hard at us with book challenges (mind you, the leader of the group doesn’t even have a child in our district – *grrr*), so we’re going to need to tread lightly with our topical choices. They have their censoring guns loaded,” she wrote in the June 2023 e-mail.
Ms. Chesney further suggested in her e-mail that school libraries only focus on including materials that comply with the current and contemporary social climate, which teachers can then discuss with their students about specific issues surrounding the topic, specifically mentioning the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.
“Parents or community members who are easily offended will want to jump on the BLM or LGBTQ+ content, but we’ll be able to point out that was a brief discussion alongside allllllllllll these other current hot topics (with only a snippet of a book read),” Ms. Chesney wrote.
“I’ve never gotten any push-back on my true crime novels, but then people don’t get upset about violence the way they do [about] race and sexual orientation. *sigh*”
Regardless, the issue of sexually explicit materials and imagery available in schools has caused outrage from parents across the country, while some librarians and left-leaning groups have defended the books as necessary for LGBT-identifying children.
Some have even suggested that parents should have no input whatsoever in what materials are being taught in classrooms.
“As much as they don’t want to [hear] it, parents should only be allowed to have a say in THEIR children’s access not what is provided to all students access. Parents should not be included in collection development,” Heather Loy, a librarian at Wagener-Salley High School, wrote in February 2022.
According to a spokesman for Anderson School District One, the district is unable to provide any comment on e-mails written by specific employees but stated that the district works in conjunction with parents while requiring all schools to make card catalogs available for public viewing, emphasizing transparency with students, parents, and members of the community, as reported by the Daily Caller.
“Starting in the 2023-2024 school year, the district required schools to make card catalogs available to all students, parents and the general public. Prior to this school year, each school determined their own settings for logging in,” the spokesman said.
He insisted that parents could access the card catalogs through their child’s login information, claiming that all available materials in the school library have always been visible in the catalog while also pointing at an “opt-out” option that allows parents to restrict their children’s access to certain or all materials.
Meanwhile, according to Ms. Carter, the catalog at Wren High School library remained inaccessible, the Daily Signal reported, until the issue was brought to the school district’s attention following a meeting with school officials.
NTD has contacted both Wren High School and Powdersville High School but has not received a reply prior to the publication of this article.
