In May of 2023, Governor Kim Reynolds signed into effect a law that bans any books with sexually explicit content from school libraries. This caused a frenzy of various stances from parents and administration alike. The law itself is considered vague in what violates these standards, which has resulted in schools over-banning books to ensure they can not be held liable for any book that may have slipped through the threshold of the requirements. The criteria of the books must be considered “age appropriate” and must not contain “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” according to Iowa Code. Librarians and individual teachers are held accountable for interpreting what this means and making the decisions for their classrooms and libraries.

ADM Middle School and High School Librarian Jacque Seidl spent much of her summer and early weeks of the school year in the library deciding which books to keep and which books to ban. Seidl expressed that what qualifies a book to be removed from the library was a little unclear and relied on other schools’ lists of removals to determine what meets the specifics of the law.

“I just wanted to really make sure that I was pulling books that really fell into the law itself,” Seidl said. “And so even if I found a list I wanted to go through and look at every single book that was on that list to say, yes, it does meet that law, or no, it doesn’t, just because I don’t want to pull any more books than I need to.”

Seidl also explained how the liability has added a bit more stress to her job. “I think it’s nerve-wracking to know that I am responsible for the thousands of books that are in here and knowing what’s on every single page,” she said. “The school district has been really supportive. It says to our best intent, meaning we have gone through and as far as we know, we have removed all of the books that we feel meet [the law.] So that kind of gives me a little bit of reassurance knowing that they know that I did what I set out to do and if there is a book in there, it would be because I had no idea that was in that book.”

The books that were removed from the library are stored in a locked space and taken out of the library system. The school is not entirely getting rid of them in case there were to ever be amendments made to the law and the process of reviewing those books would start over again.

A couple of notably removed books were Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt and The Color Purple by Alice Walker. These are books that were available for students to choose as reading group books in previous years and are now removed from all classrooms in the school.

Seidl spoke about the “appropriateness” portion of the law and said that it was difficult due to the library being shared by the middle school and the high school. “The state has given us no guidelines as to what they mean by age-appropriate. So that’s something that we’re really muddling through… and so we’re just kind of hoping that maybe we get some more guidance from the state that will help us with this.”

Although you won’t be able to find certain books in the library this year, your local public library is not affected by this legislation.

Seidl hopes to move forward from this change and get back to thinking about “what books are supposed to do,” which is bring joy to the reader.