Here’s how much Beaufort County taxpayers will spend to review 97 books from schools shelves
The Beaufort County School District will spend at least $8,500 on the review process of 97 books taken off shelves last fall for potential adult and racial content.
The money will go to pay for copies of the books, plus meeting supplies and security by the time the review process ends in September, based on figures gathered by The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette through a Freedom of Information request.
So far, the county has spent:
▪ $3,449.90 on seven copies of 46 book titles and meeting supplies, according to data provided by the district. At $75 per title, including meeting supplies, it’s projected the county will spend at least $7,275 for all 97 titles.
There are seven members on each review committee —a community member, a district-level administrator, a parent, a school administrator, a member of a school Improvement council, a school librarian and a teacher — and each person needs their own copy of the book.
▪ $246 for Beaufort County Sheriff’s officers to be present at two meetings at Okatie Elementary where the review committees have gathered to discuss the books. At the rate of one meeting per month, there will be 10 meetings for a projected total of $1,232 for law enforcement salaries.
School employees aren’t paid extra to attend, staff or participate in review committee meetings, according to spokeswoman Candace Bruder.
The money comes out of the same fund that pays for teacher salaries, supplies and utilities, according to School Board Vice Chair Richard Geier.
“We’re committed to it, so we have to find the money,” he said Friday. “It’s like a balloon squeeze. If you squeeze the budget on one end, and to expand it on another, you’re taking away from that end that you squeeze.”
Protecting a child
Mike Covert is one of the two original complainants who submitted the list of 97 books to be reviewed. Normally an outspoken local Republican critic of high taxes and government spending, Covert said there is no price you can put on ensuring a child is safe.
“We need to exhaust whatever it takes to keep students safe,” he said. “(You can’t) compare the life of a student, the health of a student, to that cost of doing business as a businessman.”
To an extent Geier agreed.
“Obviously, there is no price (too great) in protecting a child,” he said. “But I think it’s a little disingenuous to say that we’re forcing children to read those books.”
Geier said the district reacted the way it did based on legal advise, and is following what the state requires, but doesn’t in principle agree with the books being removed from schools.
“It’s very difficult for a government — and we are the government — to say these books are forbidden,” he said. “We should not take that choice away from them because of a small minority.”
At school board meetings, some community members have said that allowing children access to books is a way of keeping them safe. They say it allows students to understand and identify harmful situations, and teaches them how to get out of them or ask for help.
“Some of the books on the banned list address some very tough subjects,” community member Carter Hoyt said at a board meeting. “We won’t make those go away by taking books that address them off the shelves, and sometimes those books may be the only lifeline a child has when the child feels there’s no one else to help or understand.”
Seems like ‘a low number’
Beaufort County parent Ivie Szalai flagged the list of titles as inappropriate based off of BookLooks.org, a webiste commonly used by the conservative parent group Moms For Liberty. The group is a nonprofit organization that began in Florida and advocates for parental rights in education. It has been tied to efforts to remove books from schools and has chapters nationwide, including in Beaufort County.
Szalai said if the district “had done their job in the first place” when former Former South Carolina Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman sent a memo to school districts requesting they review books in November 2021 “to ensure they are age- and content-appropriate,” they wouldn’t be spending this money now.
“It’s apparent that a lot of these librarians think that these books are OK,” she said. “So maybe that would have been a fruitless endeavor for them.”
She also said the sticker price fails to account for all the time and effort the school district is expending to review the books.
“In the grand scheme of things that actually seemed like a low number because I don’t know that they’re factoring in the district’s time,” she said. “Hours that (they) are having to work on this internally, within the confines of their job and not like the principals and other school district employees that are [taking part in the review committees] on a volunteer basis.”
So far review committees have decided on 26 books and two have been banned: “Nineteen Minutes” by Jodi Picoult and “It Ends With Us” by Colleen Hoover. Many other books’ scope of availability has been limited to certain grade levels, and for two books review committees actually voted to expand access.
The three ‘nay’ votes
Once review committees vote, the original complainants, Szalai and Covert, are able to appeal. Between the two of them, they have appealed all returned books except for the most recent committee decisions from last week. Szalai said she intends to appeal the most decisions before the deadline.
From there, the School Board decides whether to uphold the review committees’ decisions. For the last two votes the board agreed with the book review committees in most cases with the same three board members — Victor Ney, Elizabeth Hey and Rachel Wisnefski — either abstaining or voting against agreeing to the committee decisions.
Hey and Ney both appeared on conservative nonprofit Moms for Liberty’s sponsorship list during School Board elections Nov. 8, although neither asked for the group’s endorsement, they said.
At a recent board meeting, Ney said he believes the committees are “biased because they agreed to have the books in the library in the first place.”
Ney, Hey and Winesfski said part of the reason they were voting against the committees is because the current opt-out form — where parents can request their child not be able to read specific titles — is insufficient.
