By Cathy Zimmerman and Sam Helmick
We write in firm and solemn opposition to HF 2324, now before the Iowa General Assembly.
This measure forbids school districts, charter schools and innovation zone schools from entering into partnership with their public libraries, denies students the use of their school-issued identification to obtain books and learning materials, and closes the schoolhouse door to the humble bookmobile. Historically, these arrangements have been neither radical nor reckless. They are the ordinary, time-tested instruments by which communities enlarge opportunity and nourish the minds of our young. To abolish them is not to strengthen education but to diminish it.
In this matter, let us proceed with clarity. Parents possess the first and rightful authority over the upbringing of their children. They may consent. They may decline. That power rests with them. This bill removes that discretion and substitutes for it a broad and inflexible command of the state. The government should not displace the judgment of families in order to narrow access to books and the common storehouse of knowledge.
We are compelled also to observe the uncertainty of the legal ground upon which such efforts stand. Portions of Iowa SF 496 have been restrained by the federal courts for failing to meet constitutional measures. Standards described as “age-appropriate” remain unsettled and contested. Yet this proposal would extend similar undefined expectations to public libraries which are institutions long governed by established Iowa law and guided by professional standards that respect both parental rights and constitutional liberty.
The fundamental right to read broadly and without governmental scrutiny is no recent nor distant contrivance. It is Iowa’s inheritance. In 1938, in Des Moines, Library Director Forrest Spaulding set forth the principles that would become the Library Bill of Rights which has been adopted by professional associations concerned with librarianship, information science, and the First Amendment. Iowans have long affirmed that access to information is indispensable to a free people. From the largest city to the smallest rural crossroads, libraries and the bookmobiles that carry them across open miles have stood as quiet assurances that no child’s prospects shall be limited by distance, poverty, or happenstance of birth.
HF 2324 would sever trusted partnerships, place public servants in legal uncertainty, risk costly lawsuits to Iowa’s community, and retreat from our state’s long tradition of local cooperation and civic trust. It would exchange discretion for prohibition and partnership for separation.
We urge the members of the General Assembly to reject this measure.
Let us preserve parental choice. Let us honor constitutional restraint. Let us sustain the freedom to read. Let us celebrate liberty and the robust use of our libraries. Let us support each other as we engage and encourage the next generation of leaders to be readers bravely taking on the world of ideas and philosophies.
Iowa’s story has long been one of building schools with libraries, communities with outreach, and rights with responsibilities.
Let us not now erect barriers where bridges have long stood.
Cathy Zimmerman is executive director of the Association of Bookmobile & Outreach Services and a former bookmobile librarian.
Sam Helmick is president of the American Library Association, past president of the Iowa Library Association, past chair of the Iowa Governor’s Commission on Libraries and a bookmobile librarian.
