The Alberta government is working on having minimum standards for school libraries when it comes to “age-appropriate” books.
Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides says with different school boards having their own approaches for library materials, they want to have some consistent standards.
“There’s a lot of variance and we don’t want to interfere with the school boards ability to set their own policies, but we want to establish some basis and we want to establish some standards to say whatever your policies look like and however you develop them, you at a minimum cannot have material that has graphic depictions of sexual acts available for elementary age students.”
The province started work on this after it found out about some books containing graphic sexual content in some school libraries, mainly in Calgary and Edmonton.
There are some schools where the library is considered a public library, Nicolaides says these changes would not affect those.
“Those schools are governed under municipal affairs and legislation that covers municipal and other public libraries. That would be something that the Minister of Municipal Affairs would have to look at.”
Peace River MLA Dan Williams took on the role of Municipal Affairs Minister last month.
– Kyle Moore, Trending 55 Newsroom
