Your vote for Iowa's next junior senator can protect our right to READ
- 4 days ago
- 2 min read
Iowans for Decency member Kitty Sheehan pens a guest column that has appeared in both the Iowa City Press-Citizen and the Carroll Times Herald this week about Iowa's sharp turn toward book banning and censorship. Who Iowa voters decide to send to Congress and the Terrace Hill Mansion in Des Moines this November will determine if our public schools continue to slide further in the rankings.
Only the state of Florida has beaten Iowa in the number of books banned or pulled from library shelves across various school districts. At a time when 50% of U.S. adults have reading comprehension at or below 6th grade, it seems counterintuitive that we're actively working to restrict access to books.
Sheehan notes that 3,864 books were banned in Iowa last year, usually due to a small group of right-wing activists. It's almost laughable that Iowa's official state quarter features a one-room schoolhouse with "Foundation in Education" imprinted on the back side.
She includes a powerful message to readers:
Don’t be afraid of young people; be afraid for them. We cannot know how denying access to works of art might divert a student from a path that could change the world.
Book bans were nothing new to Sheehan, as she recalls when Iowans for Decency's co-founder, Peter Hedges' book "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" was pulled from the shelves at Carroll High School in 2006. Her own daughter, then a student, joined a group to push back against the school board.
Their efforts were successful. The Carroll school board voted 4-1 to overturn the superintendent’s decision and return the book to the high school’s literature-to-film class and library.
At the time, one of the group’s leaders, Adam Lange, said, “When we’re in college, we’re going to face much worse material than a couple of paragraphs in a book.”
The students who fought that ban went on to careers as lawyers, designers, technology leaders, doctors, dentists, and nurses, some in their hometown of Carroll.
They set out to make the world better, and they are doing that.
Now that Hedges, Sheehan, and Iowans for Decency are working to encourage Iowa voters to rediscover their state's progressive and "pro-reading" roots, our story has come full circle.
By electing Democrat candidate Josh Turek to the U.S. Senate, who considers banning books a form of "state censorship" and says it "is fundamentally wrong," Iowa can focus on bringing its public schools back to their former glory. Sheehan concludes her piece with:
This November, your vote can help keep the contents of Iowa’s school libraries free and accessible to all students.
