NOBLESVILLE, Ind. — The school board meeting in Noblesville was packed Tuesday night as the panel appointed a Noblesville High School teacher to represent the district on the Hamilton East Public Library Board.
Bill Kenley, an English teacher at the high school, replaces library board president Laura Alerding, who also serves on the Noblesville school board. The board approved Kenley in a 3-2 vote, with Alerding casting one of the votes against his appointment.
Members of the public spoke for more than an hour discussing who should be responsible for the content in the library. Under a new policy, the library's board is reviewing books in the teen section for "inappropriate content."
According to the new policy, passed by the seven-member library board and carrying a cost estimated of hundreds of thousands of dollars, the books are being checked for material or pictures that are not age-appropriate.
Under the new policy, the library board has decided that means books that contain nudity, alcohol or drug use, repeated profanity, depictions of violence or incitement to violence and any kind of sexual content in them.
According to board documents, at last month's meeting, the board said it has looked at 1,859 physical books so far. Of those, 1,385 of them were moved from the Young Adult section to the Adult or General section.
Young adults can still check them out, they just have to go looking for them in the adult section.
Over the weekend, Alerding blamed an "error" by library staff in implementing the board's collection development policy after Indianapolis author John Green criticized the library for moving his young adult novel "The Fault in Our Stars" from the adult section.
Alerding's statement about the staff error said Green's book "should be moved back to the teen section immediately." But the author replied there were "hundreds of other (young adult) titles" that have also been wrongly classified as adult books by the library's policy.
"Award-winning classics of YA lit by everyone from Nic Stone to Judy Blume continue to be wrong shelved by a ridiculous policy that embarrasses Central Indiana," Green posted Monday. "Change the policy not just for TFIOS, but for all."
The policy will be up for further discussion at the library board's next meeting, Thursday, Aug. 24 at 6:15 p.m. in Noblesville.