Wake County school librarians are urging the school district to protect teachers by not listing their names on new state-mandated online catalogs of classroom library books.
A new state law, passed in July, requires North Carolina school districts to post the names of all library books in each school, including the books that teachers keep in their classroom libraries. School librarians warned at Tuesday’s Wake County school board meeting that teachers are being put at risk because their names are on the online lists the district are compiling.
“I am hearing from staff members that they are afraid of inadvertently housing a ‘bad book’ and therefore will strip down their literacy-rich classrooms to avoid public persecution on social media from extremists who don’t even have children in our district,” said Linda Dextre, the librarian at Broughton High School in Raleigh.
List teacher names or classroom numbers?
House Bill 805 became law on July 29 over the veto of Democratic Gov. Josh Stein. The book cataloging requirement only applies to public school districts. It does not apply to charter schools or to private schools that receive taxpayer-funded vouchers…