Hermon parents who Monday night lost their fight in a 5-1 vote to limit student access to school library books containing explicit sexual material will consider launching a recall campaign to unseat the school board members who did not support their efforts.
A spokesperson for the group Concerned Citizens of Hermon said after the vote that members will decide this week whether to take out petitions to force a recall election or to wait until the town election in June and work to put candidates who support its positions on the Hermon School Committee.
More than 100 residents, parents, students, teachers and staff attended Monday night’s meeting. Of those, about a dozen spoke in favor of identifying books in the library that have sexual content and a handful of others, including the students who spoke, opposed it.
Those who supported identifying books with sexual content denied they wanted to ban books from the school libraries but those who opposed the idea said it was censorship of ideas.
School Committee member Haily Keezer, who was elected to her first three-year term in June, twice proposed sending the library book policy back to the subcommittee reworking it with the instruction that it form an ad hoc made up of residents and staff to come up with content standards for library books. Both times her motion failed for lack of a second.
Hermon schools have a policy that allows parents to opt their children out of curriculum material they deem inappropriate. The department also allows parents to prevent a student from checking out certain books, but not from taking them off the shelves and perusing them.
One idea some parents support would not allow students to access books in the elementary, middle and high school libraries that contain: visual or visually implied depictions of sexual acts or simulations of such acts; explicit or implied written descriptions of sexual acts; or visual depictions of specified anatomical areas without parental consent. There would be an exception in the middle and high schools for diagrams about anatomy in science books.
Hermon voters in 1999 ousted three School Committee members in a successful recall effort. The group that led the effort cited the creation of two new administrative positions at an annual cost of $112,000 and the dismissal of the high school’s popular ROTC instructor as reasons to unseat the three members.
