Starting this year, public libraries in Illinois had a choice: adopt principles against book banning or give up state grants.

A number of school districts, many of them in deeply conservative areas of south and central Illinois, appear to have taken the latter option. Administrators at some of those districts acknowledged being concerned about giving up any measure of control on what books are allowed on their schools’ library shelves.

“I’m sure there are certain politicians that want to score political points for themselves and maybe make an issue of it,” said Keith Price, superintendent of the North Clay Community Unit 25 school district in southeast Illinois. “But we feel strongly about our local decision-making here.”

The state library grants are not large — about $850 for small districts. No district that opted out of applying for funding this year received more than $4,000 in grant money during the last fiscal year, according to state records.

Dustin Foutch, superintendent at Central Community High School District 71 in downstate Breese, said his district’s leadership didn’t feel an $850 grant was worth giving up any independence in making decisions on books.

“I think there’s a concerted effort around the state of Illinois from a lot of school boards to kind of take back a little bit of control,” Foutch said.

Book bans have been the subject of intense debate in recent years amid heightened political partisanship. Democrats on the state and national level say book bans often discriminate against the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups, while Republicans have argued that some titles need to be out of the reach of children if they contain pornography or obscene imagery.

Illinois’ library measure was pushed in early 2023 by Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, whose office administers the library grants for elementary and high schools, colleges and universities and municipalities. The Democratic-controlled Illinois General Assembly passed the measure mostly along party lines before Gov. JB Pritzker signed it into law shortly thereafter.

The law allows the secretary of state’s office to withhold grant funding from municipal and school district libraries if they don’t adopt the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights, which holds that “materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

The law also gives libraries the option of developing their own written statement prohibiting the practice of “banning books or other materials within the library or library system.”

Illinois’ law received national attention during a September 2023 U.S. Senate hearing, where Republican senators including Lindsey Graham of South Carolina questioned Giannoulias about the measure’s intent and the potential for government overreach.

“Am I supposed to take over every school board in the country and veto their decisions about what books go into public schools?” Graham asked Giannoulias during the hearing.

Some 700 school districts statewide have regularly applied for state library grant funding in the last two years. Since the law took effect on Jan. 1, about 40 elementary and high school districts opted not to seek the funding from the secretary of state’s office for the current fiscal year after acquiring the grant money during the previous two years, according to state records obtained by the Tribune.

Foutch said he thinks it’s good for high school students to be exposed to diverse points of view, but he felt like the new law amounted to “overreach” from the state.

“A lot of school boards are kind of a little averse to getting wrapped up in all the political division,” he said.

Price’s district of about 550 students in rural Louisville also received $850 in library grants from the secretary of state’s office during each of the previous two fiscal years. Price said the district has a multimillion-dollar budget that covers teachers’ salaries, transportation and other costs, and the amount of money it would miss out on by not applying for the library grant could be made up through other funding sources.

“When you look at a school library, it’s specifically catered toward children,” Price said. “I mean, I think it’s common sense, reasonable that a school would have authority over what kind of content is in those books, and if we learn of something that’s inappropriate then a school should be able to remove those. And if the only consequence the state of Illinois has is we’re going to lose $850, then we’ll take that hit.”

Closer to Chicago, Joe Salmieri, superintendent of the Laraway Community Consolidated School District 70C in the Joliet area, said he didn’t want to lose autonomy over his school or library policies by applying for a grant. But like Price and Foutch, he said he didn’t know of any specific instances of parents or community members requesting books to be taken off shelves in their districts.

Salmieri said many books deemed controversial in recent years are not on the shelves of his elementary school district’s libraries to begin with.

“I think they were requiring us to maybe be a little less conservative and be more open to some of those other — there were some value statements in that document that just didn’t align with my school board, my district,” Salmieri said of the ALA standards.

Giannoulias’ office said the law does not dictate what books libraries must keep on hand, and that the measure applies to certain instances of libraries deciding to remove books out of circulation.

In a statement, he disputed any suggestion that the law is political.

“No library surrenders its autonomy by refusing to ban or censor books. At its core, the legislation is apolitical and seeks to ensure nonpartisanship by preventing one political ideology from dictating or restricting what information is right for everyone,” Giannoulias said.

His office said libraries that apply for the grants must certify in their applications that they’ve adopted the ALA’s Bill of Rights or a similar pledge against book bans. The state has the authority to monitor, audit and investigate any reports of noncompliance, Giannoulias’ office said. A library would lose its funding from the state if it’s determined it violated the law, and the library wouldn’t be able to reacquire the grant money unless they adopt an anti-book-banning policy.

Democrat-leaning states including Maryland and Minnesota have also passed anti-book-ban laws.

According to the ALA, about 50 school districts in Illinois in 2022 and 2023 saw some kind of “book challenge,” which the association defines as “an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group.” The ALA tracks reports of challenges to books from the news media, library workers and other members of the public, but those reports don’t necessarily mean a book was removed from a library.

PEN America, which tracks instances of books actually being banned, recorded only two such examples last school year in Illinois while Republican-leaning states like Iowa and Florida saw far more. In Florida, there were more than 4,000 instances of books being pulled across its districts in the same period, according to the organization, while Iowa had more than 3,600 such instances.

The group defines school book bans as any action taken against a book “as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by lawmakers or other governmental officials” that leads to a previously accessible book being either completely removed from the library or where its access is “restricted or diminished, either temporarily or permanently.”

The ALA Library Bill of Rights, a document that school districts in Illinois must agree to in order to receive state grants for libraries, is relatively brief: Its seven articles total only about 200 words.

The first article states that “Materials should not be excluded because of the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation.” Other articles say books should not be excluded based on partisan ideology, and that people should be able to use libraries regardless of demographic factors including age.

A longer document from the ALA called “Interpretations of the Library Bill of Rights” more specifically references some of the political controversies surrounding book bans. For example, it says that the ALA “stringently and unequivocally maintains that libraries and librarians have an obligation to resist efforts that systematically exclude materials dealing with any subject matter, including sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation.” The “interpretations” document also clarifies that all its provisions apply equally to school libraries and municipal public libraries.

The number of municipal libraries applying for and receiving grants was virtually unchanged after the state anti-book-banning law took effect, according to the secretary of state’s office.

A spokesperson for the ALA said the new law was passed in response to “an environment of suspicion targeting libraries.”

“ALA hopes that library boards throughout Illinois, whether they ascribe to the Library Bill of Rights or to an alternative policy that ensures access to information, will continue to place their trust in their library professionals to do the work they are trained to do,” the spokesperson said.

A month after Pritzker signed the measure into law, the Illinois Freedom Caucus, a group of the General Assembly’s most conservative legislators, decried the appointment of the ALA’s then-president while also urging Giannoulias to sever Illinois’ ties with the organization.

“The stated purpose of the ALA is to ‘promote library service(s) and librarianship,’ but increasingly the organization has become more focused on advancing a woke agenda,” the caucus said in a July 2023 statement.

Carolyn Kinsella, executive secretary at the nonprofit Association of Illinois School Library Educators, said her group supports the Illinois law, which she noted still allows districts to decide what books they select for their schools and maintains a choice about whether local districts adopt the ALA standards.

A top concern for AISLE is a lack of licensed librarians statewide, including in districts that failed to apply for library funding for reasons other than the new law.

“These are the choices of the individual districts, and I don’t always agree with choices that individual districts make, but I may not live there,” Kinsella said.

Several districts told the Tribune they failed to reapply for library funding this year by accident or other reasons unrelated to the new state law or ALA standards. A superintendent in Calumet City in south suburban Chicago said his district inadvertently missed the deadline to apply; a high school principal in the southern Illinois town of Eldorado said his school got rid of its library altogether in favor of checking books out through English classes.

A couple of school administrators downstate who decided not to apply for the funding this year indicated they’d be open to applying in the future.

In Sparta, a small southwest Illinois town of about 4,000 people, Community Unit School District 40 received more than $950 in each of the two previous fiscal years for the library grant funding but didn’t apply for it this year.

District Superintendent Chris Miesner said that decision “was not meant to be negative by any means” and he’s open to his district reapplying for the grant at some point. But he said his administration needs a better understanding of the new requirements before deciding whether to move forward.

“It’s purely just trying to understand the law change, the wording and make sure we’re all in agreement with it,” he said. “I am a strong proponent of trying to get as many books in kids’ hands. … But I want to make sure that it’s appropriate for the student reading level and age level.”

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