Today, I attended the regular meeting of the South Carolina Board of Education. This meeting, lack the one last month, was unusually well-attended. The regular board meetings are at 1:00 on a Tuesday in Columbia, and are usually not well-attended. Today, due to what seemed like a well-intentioned snafu, a staff member told prospective commenters to sign what turned out to be the wrong sheet. After some audible confusion, outgoing board chair Stapleton proposed a compromise and allowed the first six of about ten folks who had signed up to speak to share their comments. The remarks below are what I was going to say; instead, I ended up sharing with the board members via their email addresses, available on the public website.
Fortunately, we got to hear some excellent testimony from a former student of Beaufort public schools and SCASL’s Tamara Cox. (We also got to hear from a guy who briefly rose to make a transphobic comment, and a woman who made a highly esoteric argument involving Marxism, gender, SEL, DEI, CRT, and the idea that The Odyssey should be banned because it taught children “witchcraft” in describing Odysseus’ journey to the underworld to talk to the dead.)
My email to the board:
Good afternoon, Chair and Members of the State Board,
Happy holidays!
I appreciate the opportunity you gave several speakers today during the full board meeting. Unfortunately, I was one of the ones who was signed up and didn’t get the chance to speak. I hope you will take the time to consider the comments that I would have made, had there been additional time. I also hope that during future meetings you might consider a process that allows more people to speak, especially since public feedback is required in the regulation promulgation process. Thank you for your attention, and for your work on behalf of South Carolina students
Until last year, I taught English, AP Research Seminar, and AP Language for sixteen years in South Carolina public schools. I am one of the 1,613 educators who left the profession last year, and I am very concerned about the factors driving teachers out of the profession. I would be happy to get into much more detail about that, but I’ll focus today on the proposed board regulation R.43-170 “Uniform Procedure for Selection or Reconsideration of Instructional Materials”. (It also seems like the link to the policy on the Board website may be broken; my comments are based on a copy of the regulation, so I apologize if anything has changed.)
I’d like to address some statements made about the draft regulations on school and classroom library materials, made at last month’s meeting.
Attorney Miles Coleman claimed draft regulations were “pedagogically appropriate,” yet also stated that, “There was no formal process for seeking or soliciting comment, there was no need to.” It’s difficult to take seriously the claim that these regulations are aimed at greater transparency when stakeholders and experts weren’t formally involved.
Mr. Coleman hand-waived legitimate concerns that Shakespeare, the Bible, and other important texts could be challenged and removed under the language of the proposal. Yet in many states with similar legislation or regulations, this exact scenario has already occurred. The Florida Department of Education was forced to restrict Shakespearean plays, including Romeo and Juliet, to “excerpts” in order to comply with their law’s prohibition against “sexual content”. Our proposed regulations wouldn’t allow even this, because they require the entire work to be removed. Under similar legislation, The Bible has been either removed or challenged in multiple states, including Florida, Missouri, Texas, and Utah. In Utah, the Book of Mormon was also challenged. In fact, the major difference between the proposed regulations and legislation in those states is that the South Carolina regulations actually define “sexual content” much more broadly; in other states, there is at least a requirement that the content be “obscene” as defined under law. At the bare minimum, if the proposed regulations are passed, it is essential that “age-appropriate” be defined more carefully.
Mr. Coleman claimed the regulations were “legally-defensible,” but there are already legal challenges to book removals in SC districts and other states-- most recently in Alaska and Iowa-- where the language is very similar. In Iowa, defendants are accused of violating the Equal Access Act of 1984– which prohibits public schools from giving preferential treatment to student groups— as well as the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution. In Pennsylvania, a single district has spent almost $1 million on a legal defense of its book removal policy. The SC Department of Education, as you know, is already subject to a consent decree as a result of a similar lawsuit, brought on behalf of students in a GSA club in our state.
Superintendent Weaver and others have claimed that there is “no intellectual freedom in K12 schools,” but the courts have repeatedly held, as even Mr. Coleman acknowledged, that students do have Constitutional rights, including the right to receive information, the right to Free Speech, and the right to form organizations and discuss topics of their choice. These rights can’t be abridged just because someone doesn’t agree with what students choose to read or what they choose to say-- there has to be a compelling pedagogical reason to restrict students’ rights, and the regulation as written goes far beyond any legitimate purpose in doing this.
These regs may be well-intentioned, although they seem hastily written, containing a number of typos and errors. But they were clearly modeled on similar legislation from throughout the country that has predictably and intentionally resulted in large numbers of book removals. Officials in SC districts, including Berkeley, have already cited SC’s proposed regs as they removed additional books, even though most of those books were previously found acceptable by local committees considering challenges. It is extremely well-documented that most removed texts in SC and nationally involve LGBTQ+ and minority representation. Ultimately, that kind of discrimination is both immoral and illegal.
I urge you to review and support existing district policies which already allow parents and guardians to opt students out from materials, and to require districts to follow and do a better and more consistent job of making sure parents and communities understand these existing processes. And I hope you will empower all parents to make those decisions on behalf of their own children, rather than deputizing individual “taxpayers” to make those decisions on behalf of all of us. If you feel you need to support the regulations, I urge you to go through the process of recommending changes to the chair under SC Section 1-23-111. I understand that some may have claimed that the Board does not have a role to play in making changes to the regulations, but that contradicts a plain reading of the law. The public also has a right, under the same law, to be heard on the regulations, and I appreciate your attempts this month and last month to accommodate a large number of voices.
Thank you so much for your time and service, and happy holidays! If I can provide any further information, of if I can ever be of assistance to the Board in the future, please let me know.
Sincerely,
Steve Nuzum
I encourage you to write your own representative on the Board! An optional template and contact information are available here.
Thank you for being there today! The young woman from Beaufort and Ms. Cox spoke intelligently. The rest were... well yikes.