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Guest Blog by Sam Solomon, Teacher Librarian at Calvin Simmons Library

The Calvin Simmons Library serves two Oakland Unified School District schools that share a building: Life Academy and United for Success Academy. Life Academy is a sixth through twelfth-grade school, while United for Success Academy is a middle school.

I have observed Banned Books Week in some way or another for all of the 15 years I’ve worked in schools. First, as a middle school English teacher and now, as a teacher librarian. Like all holidays, some years I have gone all out and some years the best I can muster is a display and a few posters. This year, Banned Books Week, which ran from October 5-11, felt the most important it ever has. 

In 2024, the American Library Association recorded the third highest number of book bans since it began collecting this data in 1990. There were 821 attempts to remove 2,452 unique titles in schools and public libraries.  A closer look at the numbers reveals that  72% of demands to censor books in school and public libraries came from pressure groups (like the notorious Moms for Liberty) and government entities that include elected officials, board members and administrators. Parents only accounted for 16% of demands to censor books, while 5% of challenges were brought by individual library users. 

To me, the story this data tells is clear. Political people want books taken out of libraries for ideological reasons that have everything to do with oppression and identity politics and nothing to do with the actual books or the readers who need them. 

For obvious reasons (gestures to above) things were feeling dire, so I decided to lean into the idea that Banned Books Week isn’t really about book banning. It’s a celebration of all of our rights to read freely. This year I did my best to spread that celebration all over the school. Here’s how I did it: 

I began by printing and hiding 100 “banned book covers” all over our campus. Via our school announcements, students were invited to find them  and add them to a 100 grid poster in the library (and also trade them to me for a piece of candy). This was meant to be an enjoyable, awareness building activity and it worked! Two separate high schoolers told me it was “fun” to look for the covers (this is like the equivalent of 30 elementary kids telling you something is fun), AND I watched as kids stood in front of the poster talking about how many books they had read or how silly it was to try and stop kids reading Drama by Reina Telgemeier (Book Banners object to the presence of a queer character). 

Next I made “to-go” materials for teachers. I used the excellent data sheets from the American Library Association to create a set of middle school and a set of high school math problems, and shared them with all the math teachers served by our library. Our high school data science teacher got genuinely excited about them, and even invited me in to watch him get kids to figure out what story that data was telling about censorship in America. I also created a set of materials for Humanities teachers that included videos discussion questions about censorship and Banned Books Week. 

I also went for the library classic – a display. This year I had two; one that included books from our library that had been banned or challenged somewhere in the US, and a “Banned Books Week Museum” that included statistics about censorship, signs explaining your freedom to read, and examples of picture books that had been banned or challenged. 

Finally, I was set to see 7 ELD and reading classes during the week of Banned Books Week, and I wanted to touch on the idea that banning books isn’t the only response to a book that feels hard or challenging to read. I wrote a lesson that began with quote from a sticker I bought from The Book Wrangler that says “A librarian makes room on the shelf for everyone’s story,” and then read The Book Try by Paul Czajak. In the book, a town’s mayor bans all books after one BONKS him on the head. Pretty shortly after, life in the town is pretty bleak. After reading the book, I asked kids “What could the mayor (or you) do differently if a book upsets you?” And I am pleased to report they all got the message. As one student put it, “Books in the library are for everyone, so if you don’t like one just don’t read it, and let other people read it if they want.”