Watch dogs and cool cats:

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Watch dogs and cool cats

• Protecting access in school libraries
• By Mary S. Tise, Librarian,
• Cab Calloway School of the Arts
• The Charter School of Wilmington
• State Inservice Day, October 12, 2007

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Our time together

• Snapshot of Delawares youth
• Issues for school libraries
• The courts have spoken, but what did they say,
  and did we hear them?
• ALA intellectual freedom documents

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Delawares Youth todaydata from the Childrens
Defense Fund (http//www.childrensdefense.org/site
/PageServer)

• A child in Delaware is born into poverty every 6
  hours
• A child in Delaware is abused or neglected every
  7 hours.
• A child in Delaware dies before his first
  birthday every 3 days.

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Delawares Youth todaydata from the Childrens
Defense Fund (http//www.childrensdefense.org/site
/PageServer)

• 10.4 of Delawares 16-19 year-olds are not
  enrolled in high schools and are not high school
  graduates.
• 105 Delaware children and teens are in juvenile
  or adult correctional facilities.

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Delawares Youth todaydata from the Childrens
Defense Fund (http//www.childrensdefense.org/site
/PageServer)

• 17,000 Delaware children have no health
  insurance.
• 8,080 Delaware children are being raised by a
  grandparent.
• 73,803 Delaware children are in the School Lunch
  Program.

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Disenfranchised youth

• Less likely to have a drivers license and car to
  drive themselves to a place that has information
• Less likely to have a job and therefore money to
  buy information
• Less likely to be granted access to certain
  information by adults in control

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Every aspect of society

• is obvious to Delawares youth.

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What do they want?

• Everything!

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Issues for school libraries

• How much information do we allow students to
  have?
• Should we label materials according to perceived
  appropriateness?
• Do students have a constitutional right to
  unfiltered access to the Internet?

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Its the LAW!

• U. S. Constitution

• Supreme Court decisions

• Other court decisions

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The First Amendment

• Congress shall make no law respecting an
  establishment of religion, or prohibiting the
  free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom
  of speech, or of the press or the right of the
  people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the
  Government for a redress of grievances.

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Corollaries

• The right to speak is meaningless without the
  right to be heard therefore, receiving speech is
  a First Amendment right
• The library is the place set aside by government
  for the receipt of speech therefore, use of a
  public library is a First Amendment right

What about school libraries?
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BUTStudents are minors!

• Students do not shed their constitutional rights
  to freedom of speech or expression at the
  schoolhouse gate.
• Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School
  District, 393 U.S. 503, 506 (1969)

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What rights do they have?

• The right to receive ideas is a necessary
  predicate to the recipients meaningful exercise
  of his own rights of speech, press, and political
  freedomStudents too are beneficiaries of this
  principle.
• Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free
  School District No. 26 v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853
  (1882) (plurality opinion)

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Minors become adults

• People are unlikely to become
  well-functioning, independent-minded adults and
  responsible citizens if they are raised in an
  intellectual bubble.
• American Amusement Machine Association, et. al.,
  v. Teri Kendrick, et al., 244 F3d 572, 577 (7th
  Cir. 2001)

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Limits to minors rights

• educationally unsuitable
• pervasively vulgar

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What is educationally unsuitable?

• books were indecent, in bad taste, and
  unsuitable for educational purposes
• Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free
  School District No. 26 v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853
  (1882) (plurality opinion)

• Relates to school curriculum
• School libraries provide students with both
  curricular and extracurricular materials

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What is pervasively vulgar?

• Why must the vulgarity be pervasive to be
  offensive? Vulgarity might be concentrated in a
  single poem or a single chapter or a single page
  yet still be inappropriate.
• Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free
  School District No. 26 v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853
  (1882) (plurality opinion)

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Classroom vs. Library

• In matters pertaining to the curriculum,
  educators have been accorded greater control over
  expression than they may enjoy in other spheres
  of activity.
• Library, unlike a course curriculum, as a
  repository for voluntary inquiry
• 862 F.2nd 1523, 1525 (11th Cir. 1989)

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Therefore,

• Students First Amendment rights in the school
  library context, therefore, are broader than
  those in a class, a school-sponsored assembly, or
  other curriculum-based activities.
• Chmara, Theresa. Intellectual Freedom Manual.
  Chicago American Library Association, 2006.
  384-393.

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Content or Viewpoint-Neutral

• Decision to restrict access may not be made based
  on the ideas the books express
• Access includes library spaces, materials,
  labeling

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Labeling

• Labels as directional aids
• Labels as guides to content
• Labels and content neutrality

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In loco parentis

• The right of schools to discipline students, to
  enforce rules and to maintain order
• Limits imposition of excessive physical punishment

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Break time! Take 5!
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Internet in schools

• More terminology!
• obscene speech
• harmful to minors speech
• child pornography

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Obscene speech

• Appeals to a prurient interest and is without
  redeeming social importance (1957)
• Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957)
• Depicts specified sexual conduct in a patently
  offensive way, appeals to a prurient interest and
  lacking in serious literary, artistic, political,
  or scientific value (1973)
• Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973)

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The three-part test

• Whether the average person, applying
  contemporary community standards would find the
  work, as a whole, appeals to the prurient
  interest
• Whether the word depicts or describes, in a
  patently offensive way, sexual conduct
  specifically defined by the applicable state law
• Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious
  literary, artistic, political or scientific value
• Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973)

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Harmful to minors

• A broader category of obscene speech is
  unprotected for persons under 17. The test
  parallels the obscenity test but the
  considerations are in the context of
  offensiveness and serious value for minors.
• Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U.S. 629 (1968)

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Harmful to minors

• Material cannot be deemed harmful to minors if it
  would be constitutionally protected for a
  seventeen-year old even if one might conclude
  that it was harmful for a five-year old.
• American Booksellers Assn. v. Virginia, 882 F.2nd
  125, 127 (4th Cir. 1989), cert. denied, 494 U.S.
  1056 (1990) and American Booksellers v. Webb, 919
  F.2nd 1493, 1504-05 (11th Cir.), cert. denied,
  494 U.S. 1056 (1990)

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Harmful to minors

• The strength of the Governments interest in
  protecting minors is not equally strong
  throughout the age coverage of this broad
  statute.
• Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997)

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Harmful to minors

• Harmful to minors means that quality of any
  description or representation, in whatever form,
  of nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement or
  sado-masochistic abuse which predominately
  appeals to the prurient, shameful or morbid
  interest of minors and is patently offensive to
  prevailing standards in the adult community as a
  whole with respect to what is suitable material
  for minors.
• Delaware Code, Title 11, Chapter 5, Subchapter V,
  1365 Obscene literature harmful to minors class
  A misdemeanor.

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Child pornography

• A third category of unprotected speech
  encompasses portrayals of actual children engaged
  in sexual activity, regardless of whether the
  speech in question would otherwise meet the
  criteria of pornography in Miller v. California.
• New York v. Ferber 458 U.S. 747 (1982)

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Child pornography

• Ferber does not encompass virtual child
  pornographywhether generated by computer or
  using young-looking adults as actors.
• Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234
  (2002)

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Right to privacy

• (g) Public record is information of any kind,
  owned, made, used, retained, received, produced,
  composed, drafted or otherwise compiled or
  collected, by any public body, relating in any
  way to public business, or in any way of public
  interest, or in any way related to public
  purposes, regardless of the physical form or
  characteristic by which such information is
  stored, recorded or reproduced.

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Right to privacy

• For purposes of this chapter, the following
  records shall not be deemed public
• (12) Any records of a public library which
  contain the identity of a user and the books,
  documents, films, recordings or other property of
  the library which a patron has used
• 29 Delaware Code, 10002, Definitions

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Help is here!

• American Association of School Librarians
  Intellectual Freedom Pagehttp//www.ala.org/ala/a
  asl/aaslproftools/resourceguides/intellectual.cfm
• Free Kids Guide to Intellectual Freedom
  http//www.ala.org/ala/alsc/alscpubs/KidsKnowYourR
  ights.pdf

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Help is here!

• Dealing with parent concerns http//wlma.org/paren
  tconcerns

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Thanks for your participation!