A federal judge has ordered the Mat-Su Borough School District to return all but seven of the 56 books the district abruptly removed from shelves last year in response to right-wing efforts to remove LGBTQ books from libraries.
Judge Sharon Gleason’s ruling is largely based on the messy and extraordinarily slow process adopted by the Mat-Su School Board to review the books, finding that the process appeared to be biased in order to keep the books off shelves indefinitely. In technical terms, the ruling is a preliminary injunction that finds the students who brought the case against the school district are likely to prevail on constitutional grounds.
“The issue presented to this Court at this juncture is whether the District may remove numerous books from the school libraries for over a year based solely on citizen complaints, even when at least some of those complaints were viewpoint-based or discriminatory in nature, while it undertakes a review of challenged books of indefinite duration,” she wrote.
Barring written explanation of why the books violate the district’s obscenity standards, Judge Gleason wrote that they must be returned to shelves in time for the start of the school year next week.
The Northern Justice Project and the ACLU of Alaska represented the students.
The case centers around the district’s removal of 56 books from school shelves in April 2023, based solely on complaints that Judge Gleason said “range from legitimate reasons related to sexually explicit content to illegitimate, viewpoint-based reasons, particularly involving invidious comments against LGBTQ individuals.” She also noted there were “discriminatory comments connecting LGBTQ individuals and books to ‘sexual grooming.’”
Those books have remained off shelves for more than a year while the district has dragged its feet on reviewing them. The ad hoc citizen committee to review the books wasn’t formed until August 2023, and as of June 2024, it still hadn’t completed its review.
According to the ruling, 15 were skipped because they were either lost, stolen or out of print, 14 were ruled to be reinstated, 14 were punted to the administration to make a determination, and two more were left unaddressed because the School Board ultimately didn’t renew the committee.
Seven books — Call Me By Your Name, Verity, It Ends With Us, Ugly Love, A Court of Mist and Fury, A Court of Silver Flames, and You — were voted to be removed on obscenity grounds, a decision that wasn’t at issue in the lawsuit.
The bigger issue, the lawsuit argued, is that the Mat-Su Borough’s approach has been arbitrary. As of the ruling, none of the affected books have been returned to shelves.
The lawsuit is among a growing body of case law over the constitutional rights of students to access information through public libraries. As Gleason’s ruling explains, the case law is somewhat muddled, but it suggests that books can be removed for obscene material but not in order to suppress certain ideas, such as LGBTQ themes.
Gleason notes that other courts have upheld school district policies that automatically removed any book targeted by a complaint. Unlike the Mat-Su School District, however, those districts had a clear and quick process for reviewing the books. The Mat-Su School Board chose to ignore its own established process for reviewing challenged curriculum and set up a committee that has been reviewing the books at a glacial pace.
The process makes it look like the right-wing Mat-Su School Board intended to bias it. It reversed a proposal for the citizen members of the review committee to be picked by lottery, and instead had each member pick a citizen member. It also reduced the input of school administrators in an effort to make it a “citizen-heavy” committee.
In one exchange leading up to the formation of the review committee, one of the people who was ultimately selected for the committee told a board member that he would push hard to “remove or restrict many of the materials in consideration.”
Taken together, Judge Gleason wrote that the Mat-Su Borough’s actions “raise the specter of official suppression of ideas.”
“There is no legitimate basis for the School District to further delay reshelving the books that do not meet the district’s obscenity criteria to the school libraries before schools reopen on August 15, 2024,” she wrote. “Nothing present in the facts suggests the operation of the District’s schools would be negatively affected by the issuance of a preliminary injunction requiring the reshelving of any challenged book that lacks a formally announced, non-ideological basis for removal.”
In a prepared statement, Northern Justice Project attorney Savannah Fletcher said it was an enormous win for students.
“Never before has there been a case of such brazen removal of books without any review, based on reasons that are so clearly unconstitutional,” said Fletcher. “The Court has found the District’s behavior is so likely to be unconstitutional that the books must be returned immediately so that students can again have free access to ideas that the District has improperly suppressed. Today’s order is a powerful reminder of the protections our Constitution provides.”
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
