This story was reported with support from the MuckRock foundation.\u00a0Earlier this year, an Alaskan assembly member found himself in hot water for introducing a resolution that would have prohibited the Matanuska-Susitna Borough Public Library System from making books and other media available to anyone if deemed \u201charmful to minors\u201d by the borough manager.\u00a0The proposal wasn\u2019t well received. Public records obtained from the Borough Clerk\u2019s Office and shared with 404 Media show that the proposal was wildly unpopular. In emails to assembly members, constituents implored the resolution’s sponsor Michael Bowles to withdraw it, calling it an \u201caudacious and idiotic\u201d attempt at destruction by way of \u201cbureaucratic nightmare.\u201d One constituent likened it to a proposal to \u201cmake all libraries children’s libraries.\u201d Another said its adoption could result in countless other books being removed that \u201care not sexual in nature\u201d but which may contain \u201cpassing references to sex or adult themes.\u201d\u00a0A week went by before Bowles withdrew the request, seemingly to recalibrate. The Mat-Su Sentinel reported in May that the assembly member introduced and again withdrew a resolution that would have forced the system to pull the book Let\u2019s Talk About It: The Teen\u2019s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human from shelves. This teen book has been in the adult section of Mat-Su\u2019s borough-run libraries since 2023 when it was relocated from the teen section following a challenge.\u00a0404 Media has obtained records from dozens of public libraries, which include Requests for Reconsideration of Materials forms (RFRs) and official decision letters to challengers, along with draft versions of updated collection development policies. Much has been written in the last five years about the blatant efforts to suppress access to books that could contain any remotely challenging ideas or that deviate even slightly from cis white heterodoxy, but there\u2019s been little talk about what that means from the rest of us. What my reporting confirms is that there are more books intended for children and young adults in adult sections because challengers didn\u2019t believe it was appropriate for children and young adults to read about people of color and\/or people who are queer, trans, or both, while also showing that a large-scale reorganization of public library collections is currently underway, that its application varies by state and locality, and that it\u2019s been very hard to measure because it\u2019s totally chaotic.\u00a0Records obtained from one South Carolina public library system show that between June 2024 and August 2025, more than two dozen young adult books were relocated to the library\u2019s adult section. Before that, the system had already resectioned more than two dozen other YA titles. The ACLU sued Greenville County Public Library System in 2025 for its board-adopted policies from 2024.Most letters from the library\u2019s executive director didn\u2019t include any reason for the relocation. However, more recent letters reference the library\u2019s updated collection development policy.\u00a0One frequently challenged title caught up in the mix at this library was The Hate U Give a YA book published in 2017 about a teenager who has to witness her friend\u2014an unarmed Black man\u2014be murdered by a police officer during a traffic stop. In 2024 at the Greenville County Public Library System, the book was challenged and retained before, in 2025, the book was again challenged and relocated to the library\u2019s adult section. What happened in between these two events, the library\u2019s board adopted policies making this and other books easier to remove.The majority of U.S. anti-library laws introduced from 2022 to now have largely focused on school libraries. Only a few states have laws that affect municipal and county public libraries, and so far, most of these efforts have either failed to pass or were struck down by governors. That\u2019s not to say state governments haven\u2019t found other ways to do censorship. As of now, at least two states have mechanisms tying public library funding to content restrictions. One of them happens to be South Carolina, which has a legislative requirement that threatens to strike the system from its budget unless the system certifies with the State Librarian that they don\u2019t keep books in the children, youth or teen sections that could be of “prurient interest\u201d to a 17 year old. A more aggressive version of state library-agency rulemaking comes from Alabama.In 2024, the Alabama Public Library Service (APLS) amended its administrative code to withhold funding to public libraries that don\u2019t do enough to restrict minors\u2019 access to \u201csexually explicit\u201d or otherwise \u201cinappropriate\u201d material, and has only continued to broaden its scope since. APLS has since gone on to broaden the criteria for what is \u201csexually explicit\u201d before adding a provision to treat content dealing with the \u201cconcept of more than two biological genders\u201d as inappropriate for youth sections.\u00a0\u00a0Tuscaloosa Public Library released records to 404 Media in response to a public records request that included tracked edits to the library\u2019s 2025 collection development policy\u2014initially based on a\u00a0 2022 version\u2014to meet APLS funding requirements. These changes appear to have been accepted. A line about the library welcoming community feedback on collection development, which an editor appeared to question, was also retained.The motives behind these changes to collection policies and funding incentives raise serious questions about who public libraries are for in America. William Rodick, who researches representation and culturally responsive teaching in Pre-K and primary education for the nonprofit EdTrust, says the mass relocation of diverse books from developmentally appropriate sections of public libraries into adult sections is a form of \u201cintellectual condescension,\u201d or the idea that young people aren\u2019t capable of dealing with hard topics through literature.\u201cThat becomes manifest by removing opportunities for demonstrating honesty for students,\u201d Rodick told 404 Media.Rodick says that students already have disproportionate access to spaces outside of classrooms where students can access reading materials. Regardless of where they\u2019re getting their books, students of color and students who are LGBTQ+ aren\u2019t presented in the majority of the books they do have access to\u2014much less so now than just a few years ago.\u00a0\u201cAnd when they are presented, quite often those representations are stereotypes through really negative portrayals that are certainly not going to use the kind of motivation students need to engage with reading,\u201d Rodick said. \u201cThe fear that I have is that at some point, we are going to see even greater disparity in outcomes than we already do for literary rates because of perpetual inaccess to quality materials.\u201dLiteracy rates have been trending downward for young people for a while. When the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released its Nation\u2019s Report Card assessment in early 2025, it caused a stir, because one of the major takeaways was that more than 60 percent of fourth graders don\u2019t read proficiently. Another was that the gap between the country\u2019s strongest and weakest readers is widening because the lows are getting lower. Meanwhile, in 2020, about half of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 were found to have low literacy skills.\u00a0Nadja Young is chief brand officer with MetaMetrics, the company that developed the widely-adopted Lexile Reading Framework because it measures both reader ability and text complexity to match readers with books that are appropriately challenging. She says the focus for upper grades in high school is really about vocabulary in contexts that are authentic.”Reading whole books absolutely helps to build that stamina,” Young told 404 Media.\u00a0Yet shrinking attention spans and fast-moving curricula are pushing schools toward teaching excerpts over whole books, to the point that college instructors observe that students are finding an expectation to finish a whole book for a college course novel. For The New Yorker this month, Becca Rothfeld literally wrote an essay about the immaturity of modern American books, likening them to \u201cthe literary equivalents of the social-media profiles that teen-agers (and adults who have never quite outgrown teen-age tics) compulsively check and update.\u201d\u00a0There are, of course, other factors to weigh when making widesweeping generalizations about literacy rates in adults. Young notes that adults with dyslexia, neurodivergence, and English language learners have historically and continue to have difficulty finding books they can parse that also honor their maturity and intellect. Lexile only measures a text\u2019s complexity, not the content or themes a book contains. And yet, books are being relocated based on content or theme. Whether text complexity is an afterthought or conflated with content or theme is only something the most prolific censors can know.”I don’t think we could take the stance that it’s going to bring the population up or down because as long as these books are still in the library somewhere, people can find them and the librarians can help direct them,” Young added.Tasslyn Magnussun, an independent researcher and consultant with organizations like PEN America and EveryLibrary was an early chronicler of the current rise of modern-day book banning.\u00a0 She says book relocation in public libraries is really just a roundabout way of eliminating diverse representation from children\u2019s literature entirely.\u00a0\u201cWe may end up with collections that have weird pockets of literature in them, but I think the more likely scenario is the books won\u2019t circulate,\u201d Magnussun told 404 Media.\u00a0When library books don\u2019t circulate, they\u2019re more likely to get weeded so the library can circulate new titles based on their collection policies. Collection policies, however, are being rewritten across the country to eliminate intellectual freedom and privacy for minors by targeting titles that can fit into a broad category called \u201csexually explicit,\u201d which is synonymous with \u201charmful to minors.\u201d This, Magnussun says, prompts publishers to argue that books with same-sex couples, transgender protagonists and people of color encountering racism, brutality\u2014even genocide\u2014don\u2019t sell, because libraries are getting rid of them.\u00a0Where the hypothesis holds up, Magnussun said, is that a young person\u2019s constitutional right to access information is dependent on where they live and whether the adults in their lives recognize them as having free will or not. For adult sections of libraries, a disproportionate number of young adults will need some form of parental permission to check out books that deal with sensitive subjects that, like it or not, teens deal with.\u00a0Unfortunately, the modern-day parental rights movement is predicated on a belief that children are the property of their parents, and therefore parents, \u201cshould be able to do anything they want to them,\u201d including restricting their right to read and explore their interests to their fullest potential. Instead, Magnussun says, adults are blocking children from accessing developmentally appropriate material in instances that deal with sensitive subject matter. She takes YA books that grapple with hard topics, like suicide and child sexual abuse as examples, as these are issues censors frequently cite in RFRs for why a book should be relocated.\u00a0The illusion of control is obviously not working and will have devastating consequences for the rest of us, which people do not want and vehemently reject. This means the answer likely lies somewhere between meeting your kids where they\u2019re at, even when where they\u2019re at bears no resemblance to the Devil You Know. Which is scary and sucks, but that\u2019s also what parenting is, and which a lot of parents don\u2019t seem to get.\u201cWe talk about parents\u2019 rights, but what we really need is parent remedial education,\u201d Magnussun added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"