Federal judge orders Mat-Su school district to reshelve challenged library books

This story has been updated to include comments from the school district and a member of the review board.

PALMER — A federal judge has ordered Mat-Su school officials to return challenged books to school library shelves before school starts next week unless there’s a legal reason to remove them.

U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason issued the preliminary injuction on Tuesday as part of an ongoing civil lawsuit over the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District’s April 2023 removal of 56 challenged books before an 11-member review committee was established.

Mat-Su is Alaska’s second-largest school district, located in what’s considered the state’s conservative stronghold.

The order comes more than eight months after Northern Justice Project and ACLU Alaska sued the district on behalf of eight students, claiming the district violated their “First Amendment right to receive ideas and information.”

A 23-page order Gleason signed notes the district’s preemptive decision to remove books prior to review appears highly unusual and potentially unconstitutional. The order also raises questions about the selection process the district used to pick at least one review committee member.

It orders any challenged book in the district’s possession to be shelved by Aug. 14 unless administrators and other officials can provide a legal reason to remove it.

Of the 56 books on the original list, the district previously approved the removal of seven, including “Call Me By Your Name” by André Aciman; “Verity”, “Ugly Love”, and “It Ends With Us” by Colleen Hoover; and “A Court of Mist and Fury” and “A Court of Silver Flames” by Sarah J. Maas.

Gleason’s injunction doesn’t apply to those or another 15 volumes not reviewed at all after being deemed in low supply or out of circulation, according to the order. Some titles, taken from a national list, were never in Mat-Su to begin with.

It’s not clear how many of the volumes covered by the injunction may be back on district shelves.

“We still don’t have a clear and precise list,” said Savannah Fletcher, an attorney with Northern Justice Project. By next week, the district has to describe the outcome for each book and its specific location under the judge’s order, Fletcher said.

District officials say some of the volumes may already be back on school shelves, though they couldn’t immediately provide a specific number.

Twenty-eight of the books are back at schools including 14 the school board voted to keep and return to shelves and 14 sent to district administrators for internal review before being returned, according to district spokesman John Notestine.

“As for the current status, the books that were returned to schools were either physically put back on the shelves at the end of last year or will be placed on the shelves when librarians return from summer break on Friday,” Notestine said in an email Wednesday.

Another four books are still awaiting determination, he said. Those books were listed as an action item on the school board’s regular meeting agenda Wednesday evening.

Scott Adams, the father of a Colony Middle School student who is one of the plaintiffs, said the injunction bodes well for the overall lawsuit.

“It’s a good start,” Adams said Wednesday, adding that Gleason makes it clear that injunctions aren’t easy to get. “The judge is realizing that, yeah, it’s a First Amendment issue and it should have never happened in the first place.”

The judge, in the order, said the plaintiffs raised “the specter of official suppression of ideas” as well as “‘serious questions going to the merits’ about the constitutionality of the District’s wholesale, ad hoc, and indefinite removal of the books.”

The district issued a statement on Thursday saying the preliminary injunction “validates the work of the library committee and is in line with the decisions made by the board on the reviewed books.”

The Library Citizens Advisory Committee, which included seven representatives appointed by each school board member and four district employees, reviewed and evaluated the books for their suitability in school libraries, “focusing on whether the content was indecent for distribution” to students under 16, the statement said.

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The book removal came after months of public testimony at school board meetings that, along with concerns about sexually explicit content, “included objections to the availability of books with ‘LGBTQ themes’ and discriminatory comments connecting LGBTQ individuals and books to ‘sexual grooming,’” according to the order.

More than 300 people — including Adams, who said he was not contacted — applied to serve on the district’s challenged book review committee. The school board initially promised to use a lottery to select members but in May 2023 instead voted to make most selections themselves.

The order references an email exchange between a school board member and a committee applicant without identifying either.

The actual exchange, available in court filings, shows the board member reaching out to the man, who replies that he wants to “be clear that I will be pushing hard to remove or restrict many of the materials in consideration” and that the books listed in a prior email “are all books” he’d seek to remove.

The man was chosen to be part of the committee, the judge notes.

The school board member was identified in a court filing as Kendal Kruse, who did not respond to a request for comment.

The applicant chosen for the review board was Nathaniel Buck, a Wasilla pastor who responded to questions via email this week.

Buck said that, before he started serving on the committee, “I knew I would find many of the books in question would be obscene. All one needs to do to discern this is to look up the excerpts. Many comments I made prior to serving on the committee were based on excerpts and book reviews that are available online.”

He included several excerpts he described as graphic from Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” as well as books the committee recommended removing from library shelves by Hoover and Maas.

Buck read all of the books reviewed in their entirety, he said, mostly using the Audible platform. Asked if his views on some of the volumes changed over time, he said that depended on the book.

“Some books, like the ones mentioned above, were obviously obscene,” he wrote. “Other books, such as ‘Kite Runner’ and ‘Sold,’ were intense books because of the subject matter (Sold is about child sex trafficking). In my opinion, these two books were excellent books and not obscene. There were other books that I thought were decent and other books that I didn’t personally care for but didn’t find obscene.”

Neither the school board nor the review commitee member were immediately available for comment Wednesday.