NEW YORK)— PEN America responded to the Arkansas State Library Board’s consideration today of a new restrictive policy for youth access to books in public libraries, with the comments below:
PEN America’s Madison Markham, Freedom to Read program coordinator, said: “Although the board added a minor amendment to exempt certain nonfiction texts, the overall impact of this policy will remain unchanged—limiting young people’s access to books that matter to their lives. This policy sends a fundamental message to children and teens that it does not trust them to be curious or interested in reading freely, and could discourage them from reading at all. At a time when reading rates by children and youth are plummeting, this is a terrible message for this board to be sending. Libraries already have sensible policies in place to curate collections that serve communities.”
Allie Grosselink, chair of Arkansas Library Association Intellectual Freedom Committee and director of Calhoun County Library, said: “We appreciate that the board understood the need to make some changes to parts of these rules but they seem to misunderstand their role as opposed to the role of locally-appointed governing boards. I think it’s tragic to upend entire sections of developmentally-relevant materials for children and teens by relocating constitutionally-protected artistic and scientific books. Public libraries do not act in loco parentis and we cannot parent for Arkansans.”
Read more on the initial proposal in PEN America’s Nov. 12 press release. Concerned Arkansas readers can join the efforts of Arkansas Right to Read Project and PEN America, which will share details on how to comment again on the new proposal.
