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During its meeting last week, the Lexington School Board publicly addressed comments made against school personnel as part of the ongoing debate about books at Lylburn Downing Middle School.
The school librarian also made her first public comments since the debate began.
Timothy Diette, board chair, read a prepared statement at the beginning of the meeting.
“We acknowledge the disagreement in our LCS family and our community about the best ways to handle book selection, library book selection, access and circulation, especially at Lylburn Downing Middle School. We appreciate the deep and thoughtful responses to these crucial questions shown by so many of our citizens,” Diette read.
“However, we acknowledge and decry the personal attacks that have occurred in some of the public debate in the past few weeks, and we deplore the hurt that these have caused to our school communities, and larger community,” he said.
“They undermined trust in professional work, done by school personnel. It is our belief that people can disagree without engaging in this type of commentary, and we urge everyone in our community to meet that expectation as we work through issues and policies in the coming weeks.”
Theresa Bridge, the Lylburn Downing Middle School librarian, addressing the Board during the public comment period, said that school restrictions continue to limit her ability to do her work.
“In a Sept. 15 directive, I was instructed to not add any instructional materials to our collection until further instructed. Since that time I have had over 100 resources to add, which students have been continuously asking for,” she said.
“I have been successfully maintaining the collection for the past six years without restriction. Materials in the library are constantly in a cycle, and I do not feel like I’ve been permitted to do my most basic job as a librarian for the past two months because of this.”
Bridge also said that she had created a draft selection policy late last year, which was not implemented.
“Had that policy been in place our school system would not be facing the onslaught of public commentary into how books are selected for our school libraries.
“Specific community members who have thrown egregious allegations as to my intentions behind adding those [books] would have seen that those literary works were added to reflect not only our modern and growing society, but also our current student population,” said Bridge.
“I’m extremely disappointed to not have the support of my own administration collectively backing what the American Association of School Libraries deems best practice. At no point would the AASL agree with the banning of educational resources. Simply because a literary work does not speak to your educational needs does not diminish the literary merit for someone else.”
