At Academy District 20’s middle and high schools, a book no longer has to be challenged, reviewed, or removed to be kept off a library shelf.
Apparently, being new is enough.
During the August 6 Board meeting, Karie Ebbens, D20’s Director for Curriculum and Instruction, confirmed that the district’s middle and high schools, described in the meeting as secondary schools, had stopped adding new books to their shelves while the Board considered revisions to IJL R 2, its current library-resource reconsideration procedure.
The August 6 Board packet presented those revisions for information only. A Board vote was scheduled for September 3. Yet the consequences weren’t waiting for the vote. Students were already living under the hold.
That requires precise wording. The record does not establish that every D20 library stopped purchasing books. It does not show that students lost access to existing collections, classroom materials, electronic resources, or outside-library services. It establishes something narrower and still serious.
New books were not being added to middle- and high-school library shelves.
And then the Board members explained what they were trying to get “upstream” from.
The fewer “yucky books,” the fewer annoying legal procedures
Director Holly Tripp supplied the evening’s most revealing description.
“Also, I thought our work session was good. And I think we do have a desire to get upstream from this. The fewer yucky books that come in, the fewer we have to go through this ridiculous process.”
Watch Tripp’s remarks at 2:27:17.
There it is.
“Yucky” is a perfectly serviceable standard for rejecting cafeteria peas. It is considerably less impressive as the operating philosophy for a public-school library serving thousands of students and families.
The “ridiculous process” Tripp referred to is the reconsideration process. That is the procedure through which a parent may challenge a library resource, a committee reviews the work, written criteria are applied, and a public determination is produced.
Colorado law strengthened that process for a reason. It protects parental participation while preventing a single objection from silently becoming a districtwide decision for everyone else’s child.
Tripp’s answer was to move the conflict earlier.
Don’t wait for a challenge. Control what enters the library.
She continued by comparing library selection with the district’s control over food, websites, curriculum, and medication. She concluded:
“There is absolutely no reason why we cannot and should not be curating the content of our libraries.”
Of course school libraries curate collections. Librarians do that professionally every day. Budgets are finite. Student needs differ by age and school. Not every published book belongs in every collection.
But that banal truth does not answer the accountability question.
Who will control this new “upstream” process? What standards will they use? What records will document rejected titles? And why was stopping new shelf additions considered necessary while those questions remained unresolved?
Curation is not a magic word that makes viewpoint discrimination disappear.
Payne acknowledged the law, and her frustration with it
Susan Payne followed Tripp with a more cautious statement. She praised the staff members working across legal, legislative, and age-appropriateness questions.
She also made clear that the Board viewed Colorado’s legal framework as a constraint it had been forced to navigate:
“Some of this is a statutory issue. And the constraints placed on schools across Colorado is sort of remarkable to me that we are all finding ourselves in this position to navigate what has been put in place.”
Payne later added:
“I mean, we are under legal constraints.”
Watch Payne’s remarks beginning at 2:28:23.
There is a fairness point here. Payne explicitly recognized that D20 remains bound by law. She also credited the multidisciplinary staff work behind the proposal and urged adults to model respectful conduct.
Her remarks do not independently prove an intention to evade the statute.
They do establish frustration with the statutory environment. In the sequence of the meeting, that frustration followed Tripp’s call to get “upstream” of reconsideration and preceded Waldrep’s proposal to stop new books.
Context matters.
Waldrep proposed a moratorium
Director Eddie Waldrep then returned to Tripp’s point and proposed a “moratorium on taking new books” into the district while the reconsideration problem was being addressed.
He suggested the existing collection was likely sufficient:
“I think we have probably sufficient books, you know, for academic merit and academic excellence as currently as we have it.”
Waldrep went on to tie the moratorium to developing a more “efficient” and “effective” reconsideration system.
Watch Waldrep beginning at 2:29:34.
That argument deserves to be stated plainly.
Waldrep appeared willing to stop new acquisitions because he believed the district already possessed enough academically useful books and had not yet developed a sufficiently efficient way to reconsider disputed ones.
High-school libraries are not decorative warehouses that become complete at some undefined moment. New scholarship appears. New literature appears. Scientific understanding changes. Student interests change. Communities change. Old books wear out, become outdated, or stop meeting curricular needs.
“I think we have probably sufficient books” is not a collection-development analysis.
It is a guess with consequences for students.
The hold was already in place
Waldrep spoke as if the moratorium were a possibility.
Ebbens then clarified that secondary schools had already acted:
“Starting at the very end of last year for our secondary schools, we did put a hold on new books being added to the shelves pending the updated policy.”
In D20’s terminology, “secondary schools” includes both middle and high schools.
That statement changed the discussion from political musing to present operational reality.
The hold was not merely an idea floated by a Board member. According to a senior district administrator, new books had already stopped reaching middle- and high-school shelves.
The public record reviewed for this article does not yet supply the written directive, exact start date, affected schools, exceptions, pending-title list, purchasing status, or decision-maker who authorized the hold.
Those are not minor details.
They are the difference between a short administrative pause with neutral criteria and a shadow acquisition system operating without public visibility.
Colorado law applies before and after a challenge
Colorado’s school-library statute, C.R.S. § 22-1-148, does not regulate only the removal of books already sitting on shelves.
It requires districts to maintain written policies governing the acquisition, retention, display, and use of library resources, along with a policy for reconsidering individual resources. Those policies must comply with First Amendment protections and protect against discrimination involving a resource’s author, content, and intended audience. The enacted text is also available in the official SB25-063 session law.
The statute also creates specific protections after a title is challenged. A library generally may not remove, discontinue, or restrict the resource because of a reconsideration request until a final public determination has been issued.
That creates an obvious practical vulnerability.
A book already in the collection receives a formal process. A book rejected before acquisition never reaches that title-specific process.
That does not make every acquisition decision illegal. Nor does the statute explicitly require libraries to add books continuously or forbid every temporary pause.
It does mean that moving “upstream” cannot move the district outside the law. Acquisition policies remain subject to constitutional and anti-discrimination standards.
The concern is not that D20 selects books. Every library does.
The concern is that Board members explicitly connected tighter upstream control with reducing the number of “yucky books” that would trigger what Tripp called a “ridiculous process.”
That is a much more specific problem.
D20’s proposed policy promises neutrality
The proposed IJL R 2 language says school libraries should provide diverse materials supporting learning and inquiry. It says decisions must be viewpoint-neutral and that resources cannot be excluded solely because officials disagree with their ideas, viewpoints, or creators.
Good.
Those safeguards belong in the policy.
But policy language is a promise, not proof of performance. The real test will be how D20 decides which books may cross the threshold.
If the acquisition process is genuinely neutral, the district should be able to document it.
D20 should publish:
- The written directive imposing the middle- and high-school hold.
- The date it began and the schools it covers.
- The authority under which it was imposed.
- Any exceptions for curricular, replacement, reference, digital, or student-requested materials.
- The number of books purchased but not shelved.
- The number of proposed purchases delayed or rejected.
- The titles, subjects, and stated reasons involved.
- The personnel or committee responsible for applying the new acquisition criteria.
- The date on which ordinary acquisitions will resume.
Without those records, the public cannot evaluate whether “viewpoint-neutral” is an operating rule or attractive language sitting on top of an opaque process.
A policy review is not a freezer bag.
Students should not absorb the cost of adult frustration
School districts have a legitimate obligation to protect students from legally obscene material and to select age-appropriate resources. Board members may reasonably ask whether a reconsideration procedure is too slow, confusing, expensive, or difficult to administer.
They may also disagree with Colorado’s law and advocate changing it through the legislative process.
What they should not do is make students absorb the cost of that frustration by interrupting access to new library resources while searching for a more convenient gatekeeping system.
Tripp called the existing process “ridiculous.” Payne described remarkable legal constraints. Waldrep suggested the district probably had enough books already. Ebbens confirmed that new middle- and high-school shelf additions had been placed on hold.
Maybe the final policy will arrive lawyered into perfect compliance and administered with monastic neutrality. Wonderful.
The Board has still shown us the lever. Move the gate upstream. Stop new books at the door. Spare adults the “ridiculous process” of defending those choices in public.
D20 is considering stronger control before books enter its libraries, precisely where individual titles may avoid the public challenge process altogether. Meanwhile, students are already seeing the practical result.
No new books on middle- and high-school shelves.
The Board says its eventual policy will be viewpoint-neutral. It should welcome the opportunity to prove it with records.
Until then, “yucky” is not a standard. “Ridiculous” is not a legal analysis. And “we probably have sufficient books” is not a responsible plan for a living school-library collection.
It is just adult irritation turned into student deprivation.