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Vaguely worded legislation is one of the biggest tools book banners have in their arsenal to empty public institutions like schools and libraries of access to inclusive, representative literature. We’ve seen this in Florida, where state officials pointed to state laws in order to demand school districts ban 50+ books from their buildings this summer. We’ve also seen it in Texas, where school districts have shut down their libraries in order to remove books to be in compliance with new state laws.
Now, those eager to implement far-right, anti-LGBTQ+ agendas have found their path to do so in Ohio. When states give an inch, districts operated by those with political agendas find their permission slips and take more than a mile.
Bellbrook-Sugarcreek School District (BSSD) in Ohio implemented a new policy this past April that directly impacts the books students have access to across the district. Policy #5780 is a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” and prohibits so-called “sexuality content” and “gender ideology” from students in kindergarten through grade eight, while requiring explicit parental permission for such content for high school students.1 This “sexuality content” applies to curriculum, as well as access to books in both classroom and school libraries.
BSSD’s board drafted and passed the policy last spring in response to Ohio’s House Bill 8 (H.B. 8), dubbed the “Parents’ Bill of Rights.” But BSSD’s policy goes far beyond what’s required by H.B. 8. BSSD’s policy adds school library and classroom library collections, meaning that parents now need to opt their high school students in to curriculum that might include “sexuality content.” They also need to opt their high school students in to accessing books labeled as “sexual content” or “gender ideology” in the library.
Parents who do not take the step to opt their students in will not choke student library access but will see their students given “alternative instruction of equal academic weight,” as appropriate.
Policy #5780 defines “sexuality content” as “private sexual acts or sexual intercourse in any form.” Board member Audra Dorn described the ambiguous term as “if you could do it on a park bench and not be arrested for it…that’s not ‘inherently private.’” Such a broad definition inherently excludes any and all books that discuss sexual assault, sexual abuse, and rape–topics that young readers deserve access to in order to protect themselves and topics which most impact girls, women, and trans folks. Historically, young people having access to such materials has helped them come forward about being victims of these horrendous acts.
That isn’t the only issue, of course. So, too, is the fact that young people who are queer or who interact with queer people–which is everyone–deserve access to books written for them that center LGBTQ+ voices and experiences. They also deserve access to books about puberty and sex, as books provide a safe, professionally-vetted space to learn. Books selected for school and classroom libraries aren’t made randomly. They go through numerous gates and reviews, from idea to final product on shelves.
In BSSD, for students in grade eight and lower, any and all “sexuality content” or “gender ideology” is prohibited. Books determined to be included under those partisan-aligned designations are simply gone. There is no information available about where or how parental rights operate here–these students have no access to these books in their classrooms or libraries, and parents don’t appear to have the right to allow their students access to those books at the high school library.
This begs the perennial question of which parents have rights.
BSSD began to fully enforce Policy #5780 when the new school year began in August. The high school library was shut down in order for the librarian–there is only one–to comb through the collection and identify any books in violation with the Parental Rights Bill. But it wasn’t just identifying the so-called “inappropriate” books. The librarian also needed to determine where and how they would implement the second part of the new policy: providing enough information about the books in the collection so that parents could decide whether or not they allow their high schoolers access to the library at all. It was a bigger and different ask than for libraries serving younger students.
As of this writing, the books falling beneath the board’s policy definitions are labeled with what kind of content is within them. Students cannot borrow them without parental permission.
The responsibility of determining “sexuality content” and “gender ideology” fell to the library workers. This isn’t a bug but a feature of such policy, as it allows for pointing the finger to the most vulnerable when it comes to oversights or not understanding the ill-defined terminology.
Initially, many of the books in the K-8 libraries that would be prohibited per the policy were marked as to be discarded. This included five titles in the BSSD intermediate school: the oft-challenged LGBTQ+ books George/Melissa by Alex Gino and Too Bright to See by Kyle Lukoff, as well as The Hammer of Thor and Ship of the Dead by Rick Riordan, as well as No Girls Allowed: Tales of Daring Women Dressed As Men by Susan Hughes. An additional 31 titles were flagged at Bellbrook Middle School, including titles like Bone Gap by Laura Ruby, Paper Towns by John Green, and The Breakaways by Cathy G. Johnson.
But rather than wholesale discard those books–something that would then lead to district leadership being labeled book banners–these titles were relocated to the high school library. This relocation still constitutes book censorship, as those titles are now inaccessible to the students for whom they were written and published.
Nearly 100 books in the high school have been identified as outside the district’s policy. These include popular works of young adult literature such as a slate of Ellen Hopkins books (labeled and restricted as “sexual content”), Loveboat, Taipei by Abigail Hing Wen (labeled and restricted as “sexual content”), Like A Love Story by Abdi Nazemian (labeled and restricted as “sexual content”), The White Guy Dies First: 13 Scary Stories of Fear and Power by Terry J Benton-Walker (labeled and restricted as “gender ideology), Most Ardently by Gabe Cole Novoa (labeled and restricted as “gender ideology”), and Ash’s Cabin by Jen Wang (labeled and restricted as “gender ideology). They also include classics frequently taught in high school, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (labeled and restricted as “sexual content”), Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (labeled and restricted as “sexual content”), The Bluest Eye by noted Ohio native Toni Morrison (labeled and restricted as “sexual content”), Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (labeled and restricted as “sexual content”) and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (labeled and restricted as “sexual content”).
The full list of books is available here.
BSSD’s policy doesn’t just apply to the libraries. It applies to classroom libraries and the books being studied in English classes. English educators have to identify every book in their classroom and seek parental permission for students to access them, which has led to many in the English Language Arts department to simply not offer reading materials at all. English Language Arts educators must also get parental permission for reading assignments.
Once again, responsibility falls onto those teachers to reach out to the parents for their permission.
“Lucky” for the teachers, the board saw the hurdles involved in such mass permission-seeking and updated their policy in November. Now teachers “only” need to try to contact parents three times within a two week period. If they’re unsuccessful, students are automatically opted into the assignment.
Opt-in policies like the one at BSSD are intended to show that parents agree with partisan politicians parroting anecdotes about inappropriate books in school libraries and with rhetoric around how library workers and educators are “grooming” children through books that feature topics related to gender and sexuality. Opt-in policies–which set the standard of access for all students to zero–tell us exactly which parents are the ones granted rights. It’s a small, vocal minority. 2
Most parents do not opt their students out of access to materials in classrooms or in libraries. Indeed, in BSSD, 10% of students in 2025 were denied material access, compared to just one student the prior year. That increase wasn’t necessarily because those parents agreed with the policy. It was because those parents did not know the responsibility fell on them to tell the school that yes, their students access to classroom lessons and school libraries.3
Florida gives us the evidence of this. The state allows parents to determine whether to opt their students in or out of school library access, most parents give students full access to the library. Those who intentionally elect restrictions do so in the low single digit percentile, and those numbers are muddied by the parents who don’t realize they’re required to make such a decision for their students and thus, a default decision is made on their behalf (i.e., if the district requires an opt-in, those students lack any access).
Bellbrook-Sugarcreek School District’s board saw an opportunity to overstep their authority via Ohio’s new law and took it. It’s likely not the only district in the state attempting to halt access to information and reading material to its students, either.
The fight in BSSD is far from over. Indeed, freedom to read advocates with Right to Read Ohio have been working in conjunction with a local DEI advocacy group, Sugarcreek Cares, to raise awareness of the policy and the ways it is denying students their educational rights. You can hear testimony from Right to Read Ohio at 55:50.
Right to Read Ohio encourages residents who can show up to the next Bellbrook-Sugarcreek School District board meeting to do so. It will be held December 11 at 7 p.m. at the middle school in Bellbrook. If you can’t make the meeting in person, submit a letter to the board about the policy and how that policy is leading to book censorship throughout the district.
Ohio residents are urged to reach out to their state House and Senate representatives as well. House Bill 8 is directly responsible for BSSD’s book censorship, and it is likely that discussions among legislators during the arguments about this bill included promises that it would not lead to book bans or censorship. We saw such arguments exhaustively in Texas this year over Senate Bills 12 and 13, both of which led to similar targeting of classroom curriculum and school library materials. Ohio state representatives need to know voters keeping an eye on what they’re doing and saying and that by seeing their vaguely worded partisan bills play out exactly as anticipated, voters are preparing to help escort them out of office for serving manufactured panic and bigotry, rather than their actual constituents.
School and public libraries are in the crosshairs of Ohio republicans. This year, they voted on a budget bill that not only will fundamentally change the formulas by which public libraries are funded, setting off a wave of library levies on local ballots in October (18 of 20 passed, including in Green County, where BSSD is located). That budget bill also required that all public libraries in Ohio hide LGBTQ+ books from the eyesight of minors (page 1307), though that portion was vetoed by the governor. The legislature may attempt to override this veto.
And on deck for the next legislative session? House Bill 583, which would require that public and school libraries block access to content deemed “inappropriate for minors” or “obscene” in online databases to which they provide access. It is not only an impossible ask, it’s an absurd one. Obscene material as defined by the law does not exist in such databases, and “inappropriate for minors” has no standard definition. It’s a bill intended to create mass censorship at best, and it’s a bill intended to get libraries to stop subscribing to online databases altogether at worst.
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