Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias holds his 11-month-old daughter, Alexia, and the bill signed by Gov. JB Pritzker to prevent book bans on June 12, 2023, at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago, while Pritzker applauds. | Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune
By OLIVIA OLANDER and JEREMY GORNER | Chicago Tribune
Starting this year, public libraries in Illinois had a choice: adopt principles against book banning or give up state grants.
A number of school districts, many of them in deeply conservative areas of south and central Illinois, appear to have taken the latter option. Administrators at some of those districts acknowledged being concerned about giving up any measure of control on what books are allowed on their schools’ library shelves.
“I’m sure there are certain politicians that want to score political points for themselves and maybe make an issue of it,” said Keith Price, superintendent of the North Clay Community Unit 25 school district in southeast Illinois. “But we feel strongly about our local decision-making here.”
The state library grants are not large — about $850 for small districts. No district that opted out of applying for funding this year received more than $4,000 in grant money during the last fiscal year, according to state records.
Dustin Foutch, superintendent at Central Community High School District 71 in downstate Breese, said his district’s leadership didn’t feel an $850 grant was worth giving up any independence in making decisions on books.
“I think there’s a concerted effort around the state of Illinois from a lot of school boards to kind of take back a little bit of control,” Foutch said.
Book bans have been the subject of intense debate in recent years amid heightened political partisanship. Democrats on the state and national level say book bans often discriminate against the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups, while Republicans have argued that some titles need to be out of the reach of children if they contain pornography or obscene imagery.
Illinois’ library measure was pushed in early 2023 by Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, whose office administers the library grants for elementary and high schools, colleges and universities and municipalities. The Democratic-controlled Illinois General Assembly passed the measure mostly along party lines before Gov. JB Pritzker signed it into law shortly thereafter.
The law allows the secretary of state’s office to withhold grant funding from municipal and school district libraries if they don’t adopt the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights, which holds that “materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”
The law also gives libraries the option of developing their own written statement prohibiting the practice of “banning books or other materials within the library or library system.”
Illinois’ law received national attention during a September 2023 U.S. Senate hearing, where Republican senators including Lindsey Graham of South Carolina questioned Giannoulias about the measure’s intent and the potential for government overreach.
“Am I supposed to take over every school board in the country and veto their decisions about what books go into public schools?” Graham asked Giannoulias during the hearing.
Some 700 school districts statewide have regularly applied for state library grant funding in the last two years. Since the law took effect on Jan. 1, about 40 elementary and high school districts opted not to seek the funding from the secretary of state’s office for the current fiscal year after acquiring the grant money during the previous two years, according to state records obtained by the Tribune.
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