YA Authors Rally behind Fired Librarian
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Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 12/4/2007 2:00:00 PM
Young people's authors like Rodman Philbrick, Chris Crutcher, and Christopher Paul Curtis are rallying behind a California librarian who allegedly lost his job over a disputed book.
In a letter dated November 20, librarian Richie Partington, best known for his children’s book review site, learned from Superintendent Tony Roehrick that he was being terminated as a consultant to the Bellevue Union Elementary School District in Santa Rosa, CA.
Partington, who received his MLS from San Jose State University just last spring, was hired in October to update all the elementary library collections. He was given slightly more than $20,000 for new books for each of the four schools and their 1,700 students.
One of Partington’s first book picks, Philbrick’s The Last Book in the Universe (Scholastic, 2000), however, proved his undoing. After booktalking the science-fiction fantasy before sixth grade classes at Kawana Elementary on November 14 and 16, “I had more than a dozen kids between the two classes demanding to read the book right away,” Partington says. “I promised I’d get multiple copies of the book as fast as possible.”
But his effort to catalog four copies met resistance. “The clerk [staffing Kawana’s library] told me that she didn’t like the idea of that book because it had to do with gangs,” Partington says. The clerk acknowledged she hadn’t read the book
The book, which received a positive review from School Library Journal and is pegged for grades six and up, portrays an apocalyptic world where people struggle to survive. Partington admits that gangs figure in the story, but calls the work “a book about hope” that is “pro-literacy, antidrugs, and antigangs.” He’s read the book aloud over a dozen times to middle school students, he says.
Superintendent Roehrick, who has not read Philbrick’s book, says that it’s not the book but Partington himself that’s at issue. The superintendent says that after the clerk complained, Kawana’s principal, Jesse Escobedo, asked for a meeting with Partington. The request was made, the superintendent says, "and Mr. Partington refused to talk to him about it.
“Mr. Escobedo had not made a decision to exclude the book; he simply wanted to explore those concerns,” Roehrick says.
Partington, who says he never received the request from Escobedo, says that he expressed his feelings about the clerk’s actions in an email message to Escobedo, with a copy sent to Roehrick. Since the district didn’t have a reconsideration policy, he included a sample of one for them to examine.
Partington, who never met with the principal to discuss the issue, says the next communication he received was a termination letter.
The superintendent, who says he has not reviewed the reconsideration document, continues to state that the book is not the focus. Citing a “personnel issue,” he won’t say exactly what prompted the termination. But he does say that “it was much broader than this one incident.”
Meanwhile, Partington says he has received emails of support from authors and librarians nationwide. On November 28, Philbrick sent an email message directly to Roehrick expressing concern over his novel having been “banned,” and offering to “take a lemon situation and make it lemonade!”
Philbrick suggested he could “try and set things right” by flying, at his own expense, to California to speak to Bellevue’s students, and to donate class sets of the book. If the publisher didn’t supply the books, he wrote, “I’ll raise the money and donate the books myself.”
Philbrick apparently got an answer. Writing to a library media specialist he knew, the author noted, “[Roehrick] responded almost immediately.” The principal, he wrote, had turned down his offer “in no uncertain terms.”
