Racine Unified School administrators said that removing 11,000 books — including the Bible, the Koran, Adventures of Huck Finn, and The Catcher in the Rye — was well within its normal course of weeding its collection, but a number of Racine Unified librarians and union members disagree.

Have a question? Leave your question in the comments section.

Check out our coverage:

Thousands Of Books Removed From Racine Unified Schools

Rotary Tried To Find Home For Racine Unified’s 11,000 Books

Teacher to School Board: Book Weeding ‘Destructive and Regressive’ 

List Of Books Removed At Case High School

Here’s what you had to say about the issue:

Erin Adams Disgusting! Mark Twain said “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it,” oh I forgot, in Racine County Mark twain is no longer relevant. Absolutely sickening!

Julie Hook Luton This seems like a terrible idea. We should be encouraging reading not discouraging by restricting the books available.

Suellen Smith Krahn RUSD should have a book sale if they truly are removing the books and the donate it back to the libraries to offset new purchases.

Rob Richardson Culling books is OK when the building librarian who runs the library does it because they know the condition of the collection. To read that the building librarians were not involved makes this very suspicious. I would guess that RUSD doesn’t have enough in the budget to replace all the books removed in this action. This needs to be investigated further.

 

Jennifer Torres Several friends are asking what, if anything, can be done… I wonder if more books could be offered to the parents/students of each school rather than donating all of them elsewhere – if there were an interest.

LC: I wouldn’t be surprised if REA/REAA wasn’t behind this. But then again, this district is so messed up. They will just ask for more money.

K: Does anyone here actually believe that librarians or schools are actively trying to prevent people from reading? Ridiculous. Props to the librarian who wrote this excellent comment to this very poorly written article. I previously worked as a district Director of Library Media, and weeding has always been necessary because of all of the reasons above.

Here are some resources that everyone (particularly the author of this article) might want to take a look at for some background information on common protocols surrounding this task:http://www.ala.org/tools/libfactsheets/alalibraryfactsheet15

 

 

Denise Lockwood has an extensive background in traditional and non-traditional media. She has written for Patch.com, the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine and the Kenosha News.

One reply on “You Respond: Racine Unified’s Decision To Remove 11,000 Books”

  1. The books should only be removed by library staff. Someone in administration is probably trying to go completely digital and does not get it that not everything in print is in digital form just yet. Let the librarians do their job and stop wasting district resources and time with this action. Does administration not have anything better to do than to print out lists of books with copyright dates? Did they even check the curriculum to see if these titles fit? Probably not.

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