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Dearborn Public School officials said Wednesday that the recent removal of six books from their bookshelves was a one-time thing and that no books would be pulled in the future prior to a strict review process.

During a meeting with several media outlets, district officials said that six books recently pulled from shelves will go through the review process, and if staff doesn’t find them offensive, they will return to shelves. In the future, officials said, books will not be pulled until after the review process and then only if they are deemed inappropriate through that process.

Several times throughout the meeting, officials, including Communications Director David Mustonen, reiterated that parents can opt their children out of any specific book or books they choose, but that they don’t have a right to make that decision for children other than their own.

The district plans to continue to offer a “robust and diverse” collection of reading materials for its 20,100 students, but is creating a more formal structure to review the age-appropriateness of materials, especially in regard to issues such as sexually explicit or violent content, officials said.

Officials said that they have always had a review process, but that it hadn’t been reviewed or updated in “some time.”

The new guidelines will be officially unveiled at the Oct. 10 Board of Education meeting.

The district also has created a digital form that parents can use to limit specific titles that their child may access. The parent opt out for media materials form will be posted on the district’s website under the Parent & Community Portal page.

This option has “always” been in place, according to Mustonen, but will now be more accessible for parents with concerns.

Parents can use the form to keep their child from accessing certain materials or to completely opt out of checking any items out of the media centers. This is similar to the option parents have long had to pull their child from reproductive health classes.

“We realize the community has many strong feelings on both sides of the issue of limiting student access to some books,” school Supt. Glenn Maleyko said. “We work hard to make sure our schools are welcoming, safe spaces for all students, and our libraries will continue to reflect that as well.  However, we are also aware that the vast majority of students in our care are minors, still learning about life and the world, and they are not ready emotionally or intellectually to process some content.”

The district is starting to review its inventory of books and to remove books that no longer fit within the collection. An example given would be books that haven’t been checked out in quite some time or that are damaged.

Mustonen said many books were checked out during the pandemic, and then destroyed in the floods that hit the area, so the school system needs to verify that the books still exist in the collection.

That process, referred to as weeding, is starting at the high schools and will be ongoing for the foreseeable future, with it expected to take more than a year to complete the first pass.

Dearborn Public Schools has almost 500,000 physical books, representing more than 300,000 unique titles in its library catalog system, officials said. Schools are currently undergoing a two-pronged approach to review their collections.

First, employees are conducting complete inventories to ensure the catalog reflects what books are actually on the shelves and that missing titles are removed from the list.

The district also is having its media specialists, who also are all certified teachers, review the books to make sure they are properly cataloged into the correct age groups.

Media specialists have several resources they can use to help determine age appropriateness, including the publisher’s recommended age level and a number of organizations that specifically review books for students. Given the size of the district’s collection, this weeding process is not expected to be completed this year.

“We realize our families have a wide variety of viewpoints on any number of issues, and it’s unrealistic to think our school libraries can meet every individual need,” Maleyko said. “We encourage parents who are concerned about specific titles to use the opt out form. And of course, we encourage all parents to help their children use the wonderful Dearborn Public Library to find reading material they deem appropriate for their child.”

Parents who feel a specific book needs to be reviewed can still file a complaint that will trigger an investigation into specific titles, according to the new policy.

Books will not be pulled from the shelf until after the review and only then if they fail to be approved.

That process starts with a parent contacting the media specialist at their child’s school to request a book be reevaluated. The parents’ book challenge should include the book title, author and some specific reasons the parent feels the book is inappropriate for that grade level.

A group of at least five media specialists from across the district will then reexamine the age appropriateness of that book, considering the parents’ specific concern in addition to the recommendations and reviews used to initially include books in the district’s collection.

The parent who filed the challenge will then be notified of the results of that initial review.

If the media specialists feel the book should remain in the collection, the parent will be given the option of asking for a reconsideration.

When that happens, a small committee of district staff and parents will read the book and evaluate it based on the district’s age-appropriateness criteria. The committee will consist of a rotating group of staff and parents or community members with a moderator provided by the district.

The Book Reconsideration Committee can opt to allow the book to remain, limit it to a higher grade level, or have the book removed from the school libraries.

Whatever decision this committee makes, stands for at least five years, with no further review allowed.

A book going through this committee also will remain on shelves until a decision is made.

To serve on a committee, a volunteer must agree to read the book in question in its entirety, review information on why the media specialists deemed it appropriate, and to participate in a civil discussion about whether the book is appropriate at that grade level.

The updated Guidelines for the Selection and Review of Media Materials notes, “Each parent or guardian has the right to determine the appropriateness of library resources for their children and should afford the same right to other families.”

Six books that were already submitted to the district for a book challenge will be the first to go through the initial review process.

The books in question are “Push” by Sapphire, “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson, “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold, “Eleanor & Park” by Rainbow Rowell, “Red, White and Royal Blue” by Casey McQuiston and “This Book is Gay” by Juno Dawson.

“And They Lived” by Steven Salvatore, also was complained about, but it was not in any of the libraries operated by DPS.

The district also is working with Wayne RESA on options to limit certain titles through their digital school library program for parents who request that and hopes to soon be offering digital books again to students.

“We appreciate patience from our parents and community members as we implement this new process,” Maleyko said. “Reading and critical thinking are enormously important life skills, and we are always working to find the balance between encouraging our students to explore the wonders of the written word, while ensuring they can do so with age-appropriate material.”

Protests both for and against the banning of certain books were held in Dearborn last month. Shortly after that, Mayor Abdullah Hammoud announced that the city would not be removing any books from the Dearborn Public Library’s shelves regardless of what the school district decided to do with its libraries.

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