Group puts spotlight on school book list

Angie Langlie read aloud from a book at last week’s Owatonna School Board meeting that she said is on a shelf of the local middle school library, which serves sixth- through eighth-grade students.
The book, “Flamer,” is a graphic novel – meaning it uses sequential art, much like a comic book, to tell the story.
It’s about a 14-year-old Filipino American boy who is coming to terms with being gay. “Flamer” takes place at Boy Scout camp and contains vulgar language and crude, sexually-based behavior.
It was clear that visitors and school board members alike were uncomfortable listening to Langlie read a few excerpts.
A co-founder of United Patriots for Accountability, Langlie said she was “unraveling what’s offered in our schools’ libraries.”
But “Flamer” isn’t on the shelves of any Owatonna school libraries, said Superintendent Jeff Elstad.
“First and foremost, the book that was referenced at the school board meeting never went into circulation for our students,” he said. “We have a process when we order books; the additional step we take is our media specialists review them and read every one of them. If the books are deemed inappropriate, we pull them and never put them in circulation, then we destroy them.”
Langlie insists the book can be found on the shelf Owatonna Middle School, though the book she used last week was checked out from the Owatonna Public Library’s adult section.
“Obviously I can’t check anything out of the school library, because I’m not a student,” she said.
Langlie used the list of 850 books that Texas legislator Matt Krause wants to ban and cross-referenced it with Owatonna’s online media center list.
“Yes, it’s (at the middle school), and I even took a screenshot of it,” she said, apparently referring to the list, not the actual book.
Also on Krause’s list: The graphic novel version of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery;” “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” which won a Pulitzer Prize; and “This is Your Time,” by Ruby Bridges, one of the first Black students to integrate into an all-white school.
“Flamer” remains on the local book list, Elstad said, but only because the list hasn’t been updated.
OPS is one of hundreds of thousands of school districts that uses a program called Destiny System Library Manager. It compiles recommendations from publishers, teachers, authors and librarians, then populates the list into the school’s system for ordering.
“The content that was shared the other night was inappropriate; it shouldn’t be in a school,” Elstad said. “That’s a logical and reasonable thing to say. We need to be more diligent about our Destiny list; when we pull (the books), then they need to be taken off the list.”
The media specialist tasked with that responsibility has been on maternity leave since the beginning of the year, he said.
“That step in the process got missed, but (the book) never hit circulation and the process that we have worked.”
“Flamer” is the first of many books she plans to bring before the school board, Langlie said.
“I have a couple picked out that I’m still doing some more research on that I will be speaking about at the next school board meeting,” she said.
Among them are books about gender identity, transgender, anti-racism and more.
“How to Be an Antiracist,” by Ibram Kendi, “is saying that we all have racist biases that lead us to become racist,” Langlie said. “That’s not fair. We’re not systemically racist; not everybody is born with racism.
“What we’re trying to get people to realize is that there are other things happening in our district,” she said. “We’re trying to be transparent; we’re trying to hold people accountable. We’re not trying to change people’s minds … they can make their own personal choice based on what their morals are.”
Elstad said the board has asked him to address the issue at its next meeting, set for Dec. 13.