Pennridge ordered to produce library records, pay legal fees for dad challenging book removals

More than a year after he tried to determine whether the Pennridge School District had been secretly banning books, Darren Laustsen may finally get an answer.

A Common Pleas Court judge on Friday sided with Laustsen, who has a child in the Pennridge district, in his battle for records of library books checked out by staff members. The judge, Jordan Yeager, ordered the district to both give Laustsen the records he sought last October and pay his lawyer’s fees, which are still being finalized.

But the decision went further than an order to turn over information. Yeager said the district had not just failed to respond to Laustsen, but had deliberately hidden books checked out by staff — after administrators had acknowledged to Laustsen that they were checking out books to review them under a new school board policy prohibiting “sexualized content” in library collections.

“The district altered the records that were the subject of the request, thwarted public access to public information, and effectuated a cover-up of faculty, administrators, and other non-students’ removal of books from Pennridge High School’s library shelves,” Yeager wrote.

The judge also quoted George Orwell’s 1984 — “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past” — writing that Pennridge had “produced a manipulated” checkout report in “an attempt to control the past.”

A Pennridge spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

The bluntly worded decision doesn’t resolve the bigger question about what books Pennridge has pulled under the library policy, which the Bucks County district passed last year after a similar policy was adopted by the Central Bucks School District.

Laustsen has already reached his own conclusions about more than a dozen books he believes have been effectively banned from Pennridge High School: Through searches of the district’s online card catalog, he identified books frequently targeted by such groups as Moms for Liberty that were checked out for unusually long periods before winding up on library “weeding” lists — proposed to be discarded for such reasons as “infrequent use.”

But to him and his lawyer, the ruling made a strong statement about the lengths the district went to in an effort to cover up its actions.

“They lied to a parent. They’re lying to taxpayers about what they’re doing,” said Joy Ramsingh, who represented Laustsen. “It’s just tremendously sad to me. I think the school has really let down the community.”

» READ MORE: Is Pennridge secretly banning books? This dad went to court to find out.

The dispute between Laustsen and Pennridge began after the school board’s vote on the library policy in September 2022. The night of the vote, board members said the book Allegedly, by Tiffany D. Jackson — a thriller about a Black girl navigating the juvenile justice system — had been pulled from library shelves due to its content.

The next day, Laustsen emailed the district’s then-superintendent, David Bolton, asking what other books might have been removed. Bolton said that he had checked out Allegedly in order to read it, but that there had been “no formal ‘removal.’”

Searching the high school’s online card catalog for other frequently banned books, Laustsen noticed that all nine copies of Looking for Alaska, by John Green — a coming-of-age novel set at a boarding school — had been checked out for nearly a year. He asked Bolton about the book; the superintendent said it was “also being reviewed” based on the new policy.

Laustsen, who found other books in the high school library had similarly long checkout times, suspected that they were also the subject of unannounced reviews. He filed an open-records request with the district for books checked out by patrons who were not students.

But the response he got didn’t include Allegedly or Looking for Alaska. Noticing the discrepancy, Laustsen appealed to Pennsylvania’s Office of Open Records, which resulted in the district supplying more records — also inconsistent with what Laustsen had found by searching the card catalog.

The district then said that it couldn’t definitively answer Laustsen’s question because non-students had used student accounts to check out books. The open records office accepted that position.

The district, however, could have shared that information before Laustsen pursued an appeal, rather than refusing to acknowledge the inconsistencies pointed out by Laustsen, Yeager said. It also could have run a report of checkouts by student accounts, and redacted the names of students. (Yeager noted that Pennridge has “not offered a credible explanation for why non-students were using student accounts to check out books.”)

Also unacknowledged by the district: On the day it produced a report for Laustsen, it checked in books from non-student accounts and checked them back out under student accounts — meaning Laustsen’s report “would necessarily be incomplete,” Yeager said.

That only came to light fact recently — prompting Laustsen to file an emergency petition last month. Pennridge concluded that someone had been “manipulating” records, but didn’t offer further explanation.

“The district cannot create a maze, hide information at the end of the maze, and then claim that it cannot access the information because it can’t find its way through the maze,” Yeager wrote. He added that “the district is the creator of its own destiny” — quoting Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain, a book banned in some schools.

Yeager’s finding that Pennridge acted in “bad faith” is unusual, Ramsingh said; normally, such findings in open-records cases stem from an agency not responding, rather than falsifying a record.

“I see so many cases where people have a hunch this is going on but they’re not able to prove it,” Ramsingh said.

Although Yeager ordered Pennridge to turn over the records Laustsen asked for, it isn’t clear what he’ll get: The district revealed last month that it had changed its library database system over the summer. (”The district has further complicated matters,” Yeager wrote.)

Still, Laustsen hopes the decision forces the district to account for its actions.

“They were pulling all these books out ... and trying to keep it private,” he said.