Defective policy is to blame for chaos surrounding the Baldwin school district’s handling of a request to stop a ninth-grade class from reading the controversial novel “We All Fall Down.”

Beverley Becker, associate director of the American Library Assn.’s office of intellectual freedom in Chicago, said failure to set down in writing precise regulations for processing challenges on library or curriculum materials was a prescription for disaster.

“It makes it hard to make good decisions,” Becker said. “It also makes it hard to defend your actions.”

In Baldwin, Supt. Jim White pulled the novel from a freshman orientation class. It’s not clear whether district policy allows the superintendent to act unilaterally. He got involved after a parent complained about sexually explicit language in the book.

The school board responded to White’s decision by appointing a high school committee to evaluate the novel by Robert Cormier.

Before forming the committee, the board realized the district’s policy manual addressed only public challenges of library materials. It doesn’t cover challenges to classroom curriculum items, including “We All Fall Down.” The board asked the committee to follow rules for challenges of library books.

Five days later, without public notice of intent to revisit the committee’s assignment, the board voted to disband the committee before it ever met. White had convinced a majority of the board that rules for appointing a review committee hadn’t been properly adopted five years ago.

But Jana Jorn, librarian at Baldwin High School, said the superintendent was mistaken. She helped write the district’s regulations on library challenges and said the board endorsed the policy in 1998.

“I feel it was approved,” Jorn said. “The procedures are clear.”

Board member Blaine Cone rejected Jorn’s recollection and said, “There is no record of it being approved.”

Scrambling

The board instructed White and Connie Wehmeyer, the district’s curriculum director, to draft new policy on book challenges by the board’s meeting Oct. 13. The core of the revised manual will be language recommended by the Kansas Association of School Boards.

Only after the Baldwin board adopts new rules will a parent’s challenge to classroom use of Cormier’s award-winning novel be handed to a realigned committee, White said.

“They’re sort of scrambling on what to do,” said Becker, of the American Library Assn. “This circumstance highlights having good policy and procedure.”

In the 1991 novel “We All Fall Down,” four teenagers vandalize the inside of a home and assault one of the owner’s daughters after she walks in on the carnage. She ends up in a weeks-long coma. The ordeal forces characters to question their values and concepts of security in a staid community.

The book includes dialogue about alcoholism, divorce, peer pressure, parent-child conflict, loneliness and romance.

Cone, who opposes use of the book in the ninth-grade class, said the board was on the right track by developing new policy prior to acting on the challenge.

“Hindsight is 20-20,” Cone said. “We’re honestly trying to do the best we can.”

But the Kansas Library Assn.’s intellectual freedom chairwoman Melanie Miller said the board’s decision to write new policy in the middle of the conflict about “We All Fall Down” would be unwise.

Miller, who also is a librarian at Hays Public Library, said the result would be that “We All Fall Down” is measured against a standard not in play when Baldwin High School teacher Joyce Tallman selected the book for her class.

The board appears to be pressing for a policy revision that makes it easier to delete the book as an instructional tool, Miller said.

A book review committee should be allowed to do its job, she said.

‘Trust your faculty’

“You need to trust your faculty to determine what is quality work,” Miller said.

White offered insight into the direction of the new policy on instructional materials in his October newsletter to Baldwin school district patrons. He wrote that the policy would include a provision requiring teachers to notify parents of “potentially objectionable material” prior to its use in class. Parents will be asked to sign and return to the teacher a notice about the material.

“That is a major change in philosophy,” Jorn countered.

In Lawrence, Cormier’s novel is on a list of 18 books that can be read by students in developmental reading courses at Lawrence High School, Free State High School and Lawrence Alternative High School. Eighty copies are available for the classes, said Ann Bruemmer, director of arts and humanities in the district.

“This book has never been protested (in Lawrence schools), to my knowledge,” she said.

Until the Baldwin school board issues a ruling on “We All Fall Down,” the book will stay beyond reach of ninth-graders in Tallman’s class. Confiscated copies won’t be turned over to the high school’s library.

Under Lawrence school district policy, a challenged book remains in use until after a district committee completes its review. If the challenge is accepted, the book is then pulled.

Miller, the Hays librarian, said the controversy in Baldwin would have one immediate result: increased readership of the novel.

“If you want a book read, just ban it,” she said. “You put it behind closed doors and that’s the surest way to get it read.”

Case in point, Miller said, was publication in 1992 of Madonna’s book, “Sex.” It contains nude pictures of the entertainer.

“It was the most reserved book we’ve ever had,” she said. “Most people in Hays would be shocked to learn that.”