Add Student Representation to the LISD Reconsideration Committee!
Governance Team at the Leander Independent School District, in Austin, Texas
In early 2021, the Leander Independent School District, in Austin, Texas reviewed all book complaints and compiled a final list of books to be removed from classroom library selection.
Our partners at the Vandegrift High School Banned Book Club have been working their way through the list and have provided student perspectives to the governance committee along the way, but there have been no adjustments to the list.
They’re asking us to send the below message asking for student representation on the reconsideration committee.
Sponsored by
To:
Governance Team at the Leander Independent School District, in Austin, Texas
From:
[Your Name]
We are a community of readers who are working with the wonderful student organizers of the Vandegrift High School Banned Book Club.
We love the way that stories excite our imaginations. We love the characters that inspire us to change the world. We love Camp Halfblood, and Narnia, and Oz, and the many other places we’ve called home. But most of all? We love sharing our love of books with each other.
We know first-hand that books give us knowledge, joy, power, safety, and connection and it makes us upset to hear that students in the Leander Independent School District are restricted from reading books that we know and love.¹
The students behind the Vandegrift High School Banned Book Club have said it much better than we can, and it's their voices and perspectives that matter. They have taken the time to carefully and thoughtfully voice what they have gained from reading these books, and their thoughts are invaluable.
This is why, collectively, we would like to respectfully request an update to policy EF Local under “formal reconsideration” to add a requirement of two student members to each reconsideration committee. To be on the committee, students would need parental consent and need to be in the grade level corresponding with the novel in question (i.e. a book being taken off the 10th-grade list would need 10th graders present on the reconsideration committee).
So much of the conversation around book censorship deals with the safety of children, but without listening to them directly we are doing them a huge disservice.
We hope you do the right thing and make this change.
Sincerely,
The Book Defenders Community
¹https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UDuWdlGclMC4A5WxtSaRxGXwkdJv2DnxxRav6tGGY-w/edit?usp=sharing