St. Francis schools to put banned books back on shelves
St. Francis Area Schools will place banned books back on library shelves and rewrite its library policy to comply with state law, according to a settlement reached in a lawsuit filed by the teachers union.
The district had banned hugely popular and celebrated books including 'The Handmaid's Tale,' 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower,' 'The Bluest Eye' and 'The Kite Runner,' among others. The settlement requires them to be returned to library shelves.
Education Minnesota sued the district in March on behalf of students, teachers and parents, alleging that the district was violating state law by banning books based on their ideas, stories and characters. The American Civil Liberties Union also filed a separate lawsuit.
In 2024, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor-controlled Legislature passed a law touted as a ban on book bans. The law does allow for books to be removed from shelves based on practical reasons, 'legitimate pedagogical concerns, including but not limited to the appropriateness of potentially sensitive topics for the library's intended audience,' and to comply with other state or federal laws. But school districts cannot remove books based solely on its viewpoint or the messages, ideas or opinions it contains.
St. Francis Area Schools relied on a website called booklooks.org — which has ties to the right-wing group Moms for Liberty — to determine which books were subject to removal from school shelves. (Booklooks has since shut down, but a third-party organization is maintaining the website's catalog.)
The St. Francis case provides a free speech victory following years of repression of books, especially those with themes about race, sexuality and gender.
'I think the book ban movement … it really has little to do with protecting children. It has everything to do with targeting books with diverse viewpoints that may not be in line with the reviewers' political or religious beliefs,' 'Kite Runner' author Khaled Hosseini told the Reformer in March.
In the settlement with the teachers union, St. Francis Area Schools agreed to put the books back on shelves and create a new library materials policy that guarantees input from parents and qualified media specialists.
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