Utah is spending $60,000 to find out how books get onto public-school library shelves, and whether vendors belong in the dock. [1][2] The Salt Lake Tribune reported the outlay Monday. A new state survey will tell school library staff across Utah to detail their book purchases, spending, and more. [1]
The headline on the Tribune's page asks whether book vendors are "intentionally selling pornographic content to public schools." [1] That is the political charge. It is not, yet, a finding. The body of the reporting, republished Monday by Park City's KPCW through the Utah News Collaborative, locates the money in an Aug. 6 vote of the Utah State Board of Education, not in a completed investigation of any named seller. [2]
Board member Emily Green argued that "pornographic novels" are "making it" into Utah public schools despite the state's sensitive-materials law. She pointed to the dozens of titles already banned from all public schools after multiple districts judged them pornographic or otherwise indecent under the state's definition. [2] Board member Carol Lear answered without decoration. "I hear you saying you think that vendors are intentionally selling pornographic materials to schools," Lear said. "Is that what you're saying?" [2]
Green did not walk it back. "You know, if we wanted to spin it politically," she said, "You could say: 'Yeah, we're putting our stake in the ground and, yes, that's happening.'" [2] A majority of the board then approved her proposal. [2]
The instrument is called the School Library Materials Acquisition and Procurement Review. Green stated the question she wants answered: "What we want to understand is how vendors have access to public education. And we don't understand that relationship." [2] Board documents, as described in the Tribune reporting, split the work into three phases: a fiscal analysis; a technical review of supply-chain logistics and procurement contracts; and a statewide examination of library staff qualifications. [2]
That is a different machine from a title-by-title ban. A banned list removes a book after districts have already judged it. A vendor review asks who sold the book, under what contract, to which librarian, with which credentials. Publishers and wholesalers can live with a local challenge. They have more trouble with a state that treats the catalog itself as a procurement suspect.
The Tribune's own related coverage this summer has tracked the ban list as it grew — a novel that inspired the film "Precious," another Stephen King title, a Jodi Picoult book — without, in Monday's available account, naming a vendor the $60,000 is meant to catch. [1] No seller is identified in the KPCW republication. No finding is claimed. The survey has not been run.
What Monday's story records is an escalation in method. Utah has already used the sensitive-materials statute to pull dozens of titles from every public school in the state. [2] It is now paying to map the front end of the same system: who sells, who buys, who is qualified to choose. The board member who wanted the money was willing, on the record, to say the vendors intend the pornography. The board member who asked her to say it out loud did not get a legal conclusion. She got a budget.
-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin