The state Senate Education Committee voted Wednesday to advance legislation that its sponsor, Sen. Ryan Aument (R-Lancaster), said would give parents a say in whether their children can access “sexually explicit content” in schools. But Sen. Lindsey Williams (D-Allegheny) called the bill a “First Amendment book ban” and said it is part of a broader GOP attack on public education.
Senate Bill No. 7 “It would make parents aware of sexual content in their child’s school and give them the ability to limit their own child’s access to such content,” Aument said in a news release after Wednesday’s vote.
The bill would require schools to label sexual content in curriculum, materials and books, create a policy that allows parents to notify about sexual content by including a list of book titles on the form, allow parents to review materials and require parents to provide direct consent to share sexual content with their children.
During the hearing and in a statement after the vote, Aument emphasized that SB 7 does not ban books.
“A public school should not be a forum for indoctrination,” state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Franklin) said at a hearing Tuesday. He dismissed concerns that the measure amounts to a book ban, calling it a “dog whistle, a misleading argument.”
But Sharon Ward, senior policy adviser at the nonprofit Education Law Center, testified that her organization believes SB 7 is “a book ban, plain and simple. It will allow school districts to purge their book collections based on the most limited view of what is appropriate, and it will allow one parent or a small group of parents to decide what books are available to all children.”
The bill would violate students’ free speech rights, Ward added, and explicitly allows school districts to preemptively remove books and materials. Districts would be required to identify materials that have sexual content or themes.
“The Education Law Center agrees that reading materials should be reviewed by qualified adults for age appropriateness and appropriateness,” Ward said, “a process that school districts already use … under the supervision of trained teachers and school librarians.”
Ward added that similar restrictions on reading materials tend to exclude works by LGBTQ people and people of color. “These policies are intended to limit sexual content, but they are primarily applied to books featuring these marginalized populations,” she said. “These kinds of targeted book bans are what you would expect from the Senate Bill 7 removal process, and that would violate the First Amendment.”
The top Democrat on the committee, Williams, said in a statement after the vote that SB 7 “is part of a plan to destroy public education in direct violation of the Pennsylvania Constitution. That is why I am a firm “no” today, and I was a firm “no” the last time we considered this bill, and I will be a firm “no” to any step this committee takes towards eliminating public education.”
The bill will now go to the Senate for consideration.
