“When it has experiences that are too close to a student’s emotional experiences, or when books use derogatory language that students are uncomfortable with too much. When a book is assigned in school, it becomes forced, but if students want to read it outside of school that’s fine.”

“We put almost anything in the library, except if it starts to get pornographic. Otherwise, this library is pretty liberal. We have a huge amount of things that make me blush, but we don’t really censor our stuff too much. We want it to represent all different opinions, races, gender identities, so we have everything. I took a library course, and they were horrified by what we have in our library. Sometimes in English classes, I’m like “you’re reading what?” But we don’t censor too much.”

“Usually, it’s when it’s something that’s superfluous, it’s adding on some sort of your romance or sexual content that doesn’t engage a purpose beyond that. Because I think that if you get rid of all sexual content out of history books or older books, then you’re going to lose a lot of stuff. … But I think that as long as the book still has merit beyond that, that’s my go to.”

“When I started my career, we taught books that we no longer teach. The way we allowed or didn’t allow people to use certain words in a school context has evolved and changed over the last 20 years. Some of it is responding to student feedback and community feedback. When the community said we can’t teach “Huckleberry Finn” anymore, we backed away from “Huckleberry Finn.” The community said ‘we’re not comfortable with the way characters were represented in this novel,’ and we had to reassess it.”

“Extensive swearing on every other page. I think books can be in schools. It’s just whether it should be in the curriculum for people to read. A book in the library based on something that’s sensitive to some people could be in the library, just people don’t have to check it out if they don’t want to. If it’s kind of biased toward one group of people it shouldn’t be in the curriculum.”

“If there isn’t really any reasoning behind the extra adult content and it feels like it’s thrown in there, that just doesn’t feel necessary.”