The following is an email I sent to School Board Member Dr. Mara Schiff:
Subject: Misinformation on Library Books
Ms. Schiff,
Good afternoon. I was unfortunately sent a Lemmon Lines article and reviewed the Superintendent’s Workshop and I wanted to once again share the truth and not misinformation in the challenged library books in our county. All of the books challenged by M4L were from the 2000-2022 (with the exception of two books, one was 1999 and other 1998) and every single person in this chat with the exclusion of me (I graduated in 2003 from Martin County High School) were NOT in K-12 schools when these books were published, therefore your statement Ms. Schiff “I’m wondering how we survived to adulthood-all these years, and read all these books, with nobody telling us what we could and couldn’t read, and somehow we managed to become productive, contributing adults.” was incorrect because YOU weren’t in public K-12 schools to read these books during the time these books were published and could have possibly been put on the shelves. Attached is the SDIRC Challenged Books as of February 2022 and you can review the years of the challenged books as well. And also the Lemmon Lines article of the blog of the false information being repeated and not researched for accuracy….again🤦. Again here’s the facts, stats and truth for the weekend. Thank you.
Jennifer Pippin
Libraries
Larry Reisman said in an Opinion Article in September 2022, “Barenborg offered to put together a volunteer group of retired educators to review classroom libraries and help a) teachers focus on teaching and b) ensure students have easy access to appropriate books immediately.”
We don’t need a group of retired educators to go into the libraries and classroom libraries to fix the issues of illegal material in the libraries. The reason why we are in this county wide mess is because media center specialists didn’t do their jobs properly or weren’t trained properly and reviewed their own work and made recommendations on their opinions and not the laws/statutes and I guarantee you that Moms for Liberty’s parents, grandparents and community members that have been working a year on this would do a better job then “retired educators”. We know the laws and statutes including the new laws effective 7/1/2022. Library books are to be FIRST free of pornography and then age appropriate. It’s actually quite simple and instead of taking accountability for the policy/procedure not being followed from 2014 to current OUR parents, grandparents and community members are having to fix these issues. I completely disagree with retired educators to fix the media center specialists errors from the past eight years when M4L PARENTS and more have been reading books and challenging books. Just like the challenging committee must have five parents on it with children in the district, why wouldn’t the volunteer group to fix the libraries not have the same criteria?
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Sending only retired educators in there is insane. Once again I guarantee we (M4L) would be more educated on the pornography, sexually explicit content and CRT books currently in the schools locally and nationally then retired educators would be. Maybe allow them to go in after the definition of age appropriate is defined once all the illegal pornographic and sexually explicit content is out. I’m sure this will be just another struggle because of some of the board’s personal opinions of me or organizations I represent. But facts are facts.
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