FARMINGTON — The Regional School Unit 9 (RSU 9) Board of Directors discussed first reads of amendments to the district’s policies on curriculum-selections and wellness at the board’s Tuesday, March 22, meeting.
The policies, IJJ and JLC, address how the district approaches the selection of educational materials and the promotion of behavior to foster “lifelong wellness” in students.
The amendments to the Instructional and Library-Media Materials Selection policy address how the board will handle questioning of a curriculum selection.
The amendment reads:
When there is a question regarding instructional material selection, the board’s Educational Policy Committee will review the material and after discussion will vote to approve or send it back to the Director of Curriculum for further review and clarity. Unless a concern is raised at the Educational Policy Committee, all instructional material will go before the board as a shared notification, with no vote being required.
Concerns about how the board would handle concerns with the curriculum were raised at the board’s Oct. 12, 2021 meeting. At that meeting, the board was asked to approve five books that were added to Mt. Blue High School’s curriculum written by or about diverse perspectives.
Some directors raised concerns about the board needing to approve additions to the curriculum — or whether they had the right to at all.
“I’m mindful of one of our ethical principles which is not to run the schools but see that they are well run,” Director Doug Dunlap said at that meeting. “I don’t see a need for books to be reviewed by the full board.”
At the Tuesday meeting, Director Kirk Doyle supported the amendment because it is “timely” amid concerns around school curricula and “book banning” across the country.
In the last year, there’s been an onslaught of calls to censor certain books and other educational materials in classrooms and on library shelves countrywide.
A Tennessee school district recently banned the Holocaust graphic novel “Maus” for “unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide.”
Other books banned or removed from libraries in American schools include J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series, “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood, “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck and “The Hate U Give,” a novel by Angie Thomas about “a Black teenager who witnesses a police officer fatally shooting her friend.”
NBC News’s Mike Hixenbaugh called the movement “an unprecedented effort by parents and conservative politicians … to ban books dealing with race, sexuality and gender from schools.”
Doyle said the policy amendment is “probably timely and a good idea to have something in place that we can point to if somebody asked if there was a reason behind [a selection or if there was] something wrong.”
However, Doyle asked Superintendent Chris Elkington and Director of Curriculum Laura Columbia for the reason that they brought the amendment to the board.
Elkington said the amendment was in part, “interest based” and in part, a long overdue update to the policy, which is now 13 years old.
“You really should be looking every seven to eight years at making adjustments [to the policies],” Elkington said. “This is one of those we want to look at sooner rather than later.”
Columbia referenced the Oct. 13 meeting and how the policy “had conflicting thoughts or statements.” Some areas of the policy call for just a board notification on updates to curriculum and other parts call for a vote by the board, Columbia said.
“This was just clarifying in an internal document about what your process was for steps that a textbook would go through,” Columbia said.
Columbia said the amendment was made to ensure “our textbooks to go smoothly and not have the board have to examine in detail every book that goes through, but knowing that there may be a time, and the board has the right to vote on textbooks, whether it goes through or not.”
Director J. Wayne Kinney felt the amendment was a “good compromise” for board members “who wondered why we were even discussing this at all” at the Oct. 13 meeting.
“I think it came mostly from [the need] to at some point address [concerns with the curriculum] if there was a need without setting the house on fire,” Kinney said.
It was just a first read for the policy and Chair Carol Coles said it will now go back to the education committee before the board approves a final version.
The board also discussed the “Wellness Policy,” JLC. The policy was first adopted in 2006 and last reviewed in 2009.
The drafted policy appears to be a revamp of the former policy, including sections like “Community Involvement, Outreach, and Communications,” “Essential Healthy Eating Topics in Health Education,” “Snacks and Celebrations,” “Screen Time,” “Food and Beverage Marketing” and “Staff Wellness and Health Promotion.”
During the meeting, Director Joshua Robbins raised concerns about students not having “enough time to eat during lunch.”
Robbins pointed to other countries that offer students the opportunity to “sit down for … a relaxing lunch with enough time to eat.”
“I know that there are some time challenges in this building,” Robbins said. “As a policy we need to provide students with enough time to eat their lunch without being herded.”
Coles pointed out that this issue showed up in the surveys for the strategic planning process conducted at the end of 2021.
Elkington agreed with this concern, taking into account that around 20 minutes is not enough time for students to leave class, walk down to the cafeteria, wait on line to buy food, sit down, eat and then make their way to their next class.
This is something Elkington said he’s noticed when he’s gone down for lunch.
Director Scott Erb also pointed out that wellness should address stress and a shorter lunch period does not offer students an adequate amount of time to destress.
“If you add stress to your lunch time, that works against wellness,” Erb said.
Coles said the policy will be brought back to committee to incorporate those principles.
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