Managing Censorship Challenges Beyond Books: The Review

The main argument of the article was to present the school’s values and impartiality for access to school media such as books, stories, programs, artwork, social media, and technology resources, leading to access to information about under-displayed ways of life such as LGBTQ+ families.

The article speaks about the laws and bills in place to protect these types of events and resources, but it also explains the problems these events and resources face and how the laws and bills actually do not protect a majority of the things existing or going to take place. An example of this section of the bill not being followed is when an author was invited to a school in Flint, Michigan but access was withheld from all students except the seniors. Now this would be an acceptable decision based on content, except not only was the book based on fourth to seventh graders, but the school’s decision was confirmed when they received word that the author was gay.

The main source of the author’s evidence came from the American Library Association on the Bill of Rights. An example of this is the statistics used by the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedoms and the challenges tracked in 2019. The number of challenges tracked in 2019 was three hundred and seventy-seven: fifty-six percent were books, twenty-two percent were programs and meeting rooms, nine percent were displays and artwork, eight percent were filmed, and the remaining five percent were labeled “others,” which included things like social media.