Is Pennridge secretly banning books? This dad went to court to find out.

The day after the Pennridge school board passed a policy last fall prohibiting “sexualized content” in library books, Darren Laustsen logged onto the district’s card catalog.

Before the September 2022 vote, one board member had read aloud from the young-adult novel Allegedly, by Tiffany D. Jackson — an example of what another member described as “pornographic filth” harbored in the district’s libraries.

Laustsen, a father in the district, was suspicious. The reading wasn’t a specific passage, but various sentences strung together that made Allegedly — a thriller about a Black girl navigating the juvenile justice system — sound “relentlessly profane.” Similar scenes had been playing out at school board meetings across the country, with parents — some tied to groups such as the conservative Moms for Liberty — reading explicit book excerpts while accusing schools of seeking to “sexualize” children.

The board members said Allegedly had been removed from the shelves; Laustsen wanted to know whether other books had, too.

The question didn’t yield a straightforward answer. Seven records requests, countless card catalog searches, and one court case later, Laustsen has identified more than a dozen books he believes were banned as a result of the policy — some checked out for nearly a year before they were placed on lists of “weeded” books to be discarded.

Yet the district hasn’t announced any bans, or even any review process — leaving Laustsen and other parents to draw their own conclusions.

“There was no public acknowledgement these books were even under review, no due process, just a backdoor” ban, Laustsen said. “Which is crazy.”

A Pennridge spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for comment. The district is defending itself in court in an open-records dispute with Laustsen, who says Pennridge manipulated library checkout records to conceal books being reviewed. (The district has acknowledged errors in the records it supplied Laustsen, but hasn’t provided a definitive explanation.)

The situation demonstrates how the movement targeting books may be having a wider impact than what is publicly known.

A report last month by free-speech group PEN America identified a 33% increase in book bans at the K-12 level nationally last school year, with 186 bans in Pennsylvania districts. None, however, was recorded for Pennridge.

“We are very confident that our count is an undercount,” said Kasey Meehan, the Freedom to Read program director at PEN. She also noted a broadening of the types of books being banned: Although stories about or by LGBTQ people and people of color remain targeted, so are those featuring “any kind of challenging and complex human experience,” including violence, sexual assault, or drug abuse.

In just the last two weeks, the Philadelphia-based Education Law Center received complaints about six Pennsylvania school districts that appear to have practiced “soft censorship,” circumventing policies to remove books, said Deborah Gordon-Klehr, the center’s executive director. She spoke at a hearing on book bans Thursday in Harrisburg, where Democrats have introduced legislation seeking to bar public schools from censoring books based on certain factors, including school board members’ “discomfort, personal morality, and political or religious views.”

Gordon-Klehr noted the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1982 Pico ruling that districts must follow established, unbiased procedures to remove books, and cannot impose a “narrow view” of community values on libraries. Removals that don’t follow such procedures are more likely to violate students’ First Amendment rights, she said.

Laustsen, who has one child in elementary school and the other in preschool, doesn’t doubt that what’s happening in Pennridge is taking place elsewhere. “But no one has been this crazy to obsess over this,” he said of his efforts.

His quest began last September with the passage of Pennridge’s library policy, which, like the policy adopted that summer in the Central Bucks School District, prohibits “sexualized content.” (In Central Bucks, Gender Queer and This Book Is Gay have since been banned, and 60 more challenges are pending.)

The morning after the vote, Laustsen wrote to the district’s then-superintendent, David Bolton, noting board members’ comments about Allegedly. He asked whether other books had been removed.

Bolton responded that he had checked out Allegedly to read it once he learned about concerns over content.

“There was no formal ‘removal’ of the book,” Bolton said in an email, adding that in light of the new policy, librarians and curriculum supervisors would be “reviewing our current resources.”

Laustsen began searching the high school’s catalog for other frequently challenged books. He noticed that all nine copies of Looking for Alaska, a coming-of-age novel by John Green, were checked out, with an estimated wait time of 358-359 days. He again emailed Bolton.

“I have confirmed with the HS librarian that Looking for Alaska is also being reviewed by her based on the updated criteria in Policy 109,” Bolton wrote.

How many other books were being reviewed? Laustsen wondered. He found other books with similarly lengthy checkouts — such as Sold, by Patricia McCormick, a novel about a girl sold into sexual slavery in India.

To try to get an answer, Laustsen filed an open-records request last October, seeking records of all high school library books checked out by patrons other than students. But the response he got didn’t make sense: For instance, it didn’t include Allegedly or Looking for Alaska, the books the superintendent confirmed had been checked out by staff for review, or Sold.

In pressing for clarification, Laustsen received more library records, which didn’t seem to match his findings. The district said it couldn’t conclusively answer Laustsen’s question about non-student checkouts because faculty could take out books under student accounts. Pennsylvania’s Office of Open Records ruled in Pennridge’s favor.

Frustrated, Laustsen appealed to the Court of Common Pleas in February; he’s now awaiting a ruling on whether Pennridge acted in “bad faith,” given records showing that numerous books that had been taken out by faculty were checked back in and then checked out by student accounts the same day the district responded to Laustsen’s request for faculty checkouts.

In the meantime, lists of books slated to be weeded from library shelves have appeared on school board agendas — described as “obsolete items for removal.”

Mixed in with almanacs, detective novels and titles by Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner were some of the books Laustsen had been tracking — Allegedly, Looking for Alaska, and Sold; a series of fantasy novels by Sarah Maas; Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Perez; The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky; Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur.

Some of the books were marked with numbers indicating reasons for their removal — many listed as “infrequent use.”

Beloved by Toni Morrison was also weeded out; although Laustsen hadn’t noticed any unusually long checkouts of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, it had been targeted elsewhere for its depictions of rape and violence amid the horrors of slavery.

“Apparently, this was the pornography our school board needed to ban,” Laustsen said Thursday, holding up Beloved as he testified during Thursday’s hearing.

While Laustsen sees book removals as “bizarre and dystopian,” his broader worry is about the direction of his school district, where the board has required teachers to consult Hillsdale College’s “1776 Curriculum” and hired a former employee of the conservative college to help craft courses, over opposition from Pennridge staff.

“When people start banning books, a lot of other bad things go along with it,” Laustsen said in an interview.

In Central Bucks, where book debates have attracted intense attention, social studies teacher Keith Willard told lawmakers that the library of LGBTQ-themed books he maintained in his role as adviser to his school’s Gay Straight Alliance was audited after “political extremists trespassed in my classroom after hours,” posting a video of his library on social media with superimposed images of books “that I didn’t even have in my collection.”

Willard still maintains the library, though some books have been boxed away “for fear of future controversy.” He said some colleagues have performed similar self-censorship — noting how easily people can generate book challenges with the help of Booklooks, a website created by a former Moms for Liberty member that catalogs any sexual descriptions, profanity and “inflammatory racial commentary” found in various books.

The one formal book challenge Laustsen knows of that was filed with Pennridge appeared to cite Booklooks. Board members discussed the challenge in June, after Identical, by Ellen Hopkins, had already been quietly evaluated.

Arguing that the book should have been removed, board member Jordan Blomgren read a passage that described a father molesting his daughter — spurring discussion about whether the board needed to better define “explicit” language that was grounds for removal. A dissenting member, Ron Wurz, said the book “teaches somebody about the horrors of this.”

Given the push by board members to purge content they consider inappropriate, Laustsen isn’t sure why they haven’t said what books they’ve banned.

“It’s just like an open secret,” he said.