Empty shelves at the library at Erindale Secondary School in Mississauga, Ont. are shown in a handout photo. Ontario's minister of education says he has asked an Ontario public school board to immediately stop its new, and seemingly arbitrary practise of removing books that were published before 2008 from school libraries. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Reina Takata **MANDATORY CREDIT**
Ontario’s education minister has told the Peel District School Board to immediately stop its so-called “weeding” of school libraries after concerns were raised about how the board is carrying out the process of assessing and removing older books.
The move comes after critics say Peel school libraries have been removing books simply because they were published before 2008, based on board guidelines.
Education Minister Stephen Lecce says it is “offensive, illogical and counterintuitive” to remove books from years past that educate students on history, antisemitism or are celebrated literary classics.
The Peel District School Board did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
An advocacy group made up of teachers, parents, students and school staff who are against the board’s weeding process says it appears the board asked its libraries earlier this year to remove fiction and non-fiction books published before 2008 while assessing collections through an equity lens.
Tom Ellard of the group Libraries not Landfills says, since then, thousands of books including “The Diary of Anne Frank” and other classics, have been removed from several school library shelves in Peel Region.
The process of “weeding” library collections isn’t new and has long been carried out to ensure collections are up-to-date and in good condition.
But Ellard says the Peel board guidelines on weeding appear to direct librarians to follow a three-step process, with the first one appearing to place a 15-year age limit on books in a collection.
Books are also to be assessed for their physical condition and their circulation data is to be reviewed, according to details of the process shared by Ellard’s group.
The second and third steps in the weeding guidelines direct librarians to remove books that may have misinformation, are misleading, or reinforce racist content or information that is not gender affirming.
Ellard says members of his group agree that addressing issues of equity and supporting more marginalized voices in Peel libraries is of paramount importance, but the decision to remove books simply because they were published before 2008 is arbitrary and concerning.
His group says the new weeding guidelines were crafted by the board in response to a provincial directive to undertake a comprehensive audit of all books to ensure collections are inclusive and reflective of the student population.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2023.
