A new state mandate forcing all school systems to list online all books available to students in individual classrooms.
Putnam County Schools changed its policies to align with the ruling. Schools already required to list the reading material available to students in the library. Elementary Instructional Supervisor Diana Wood said the system has been working to get materials listed.
“I think its just another level of transparency for them,” Wood said. “I don’t know if it was completely necessary, but I’m also not a lawmaker. Of course we are going to abide by state law. If they want that they certainly have access to it now.”
Wood said if a parent or guardian does have a concern about a book to reach out to the school and that will kick off a review process for the book in question.
Wood said the process of logging all the books went smoothly. She said the next challenge is keeping it updated as teachers add books to the classroom.
“We didn’t want to put more work on our classroom teachers,” Wood said. “We really wanted them to be able to focus on instruction and not on being someone that has to inventory books. So what Putnam County did was we hired some Putnam County substitutes to go in, and we have a book scanning app, so last year they spent several months going school to school and scanning teacher’s library.”
Wood said during the scanning process some teachers were concerned they may have a banned book, but Wood said Putnam County currently has no books that are banned.
“At this time we don’t have any books that are banned,” Wood said. “There’s not a list of banned books. It’s just that parents have access to the titles, and if there is a question about a title we do have a process we can go through.”
Wood said she wanted to encourage students to keep reading and not let this deter a love of reading.
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