RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — A bill that would make changes to the parent notification law of educational material with sexually explicit content is making its way through the Virginia General Assembly.
If passed, Senate Bill 235 would require each school board to adopt policies that are consistent with and more comprehensive than model policies or school board policies that can be construed to permit the censoring of books in any public elementary or secondary school.
According to Senator Ghazala Hashmi (D-Chesterfield), who introduced and proposed Senate Bill 235, the bill would amend a section of the parent notification law, or Senate Bill 656, that Hashmi believes was not specific enough to prevent book bans and censorship.
“We also had school boards that went in another direction,” Hashmi said. “We had superintendents that began to actually remove [books] from school libraries.”
Senate Bill 656 was signed into law on April 6, 2022 and ensures parents are alerted when students are assigned books or other materials with explicit content in school. The bill had an enactment clause at the end stating, “the provisions of this act shall not be construed as requiring or providing for the censoring of books in public elementary and secondary schools.”
The new bill contains similar wording to Senate Bill 656, but provides that the actual language of the previous bill is no longer an enactment clause. The new bill’s wording has caused confusion to some of Hashmi’s colleagues, who wonder if the bill is necessary.
“If it is the same language that was in the previous bill, then why do we need to have another bill?” Senator Christopher T. Head (R-Alleghany) said.
However, some of Hashmi’s colleagues are in support for the new bill, believing it would prevent books from being taken off shelves.
“Localities in the dead of the night, which is what happened on a Friday night in a county around here where they took 75 books off of the shelf with no process at all, which takes away my kid’s right to read a book that they want to read,” Senator Schuyler T. VanValkenburg (D-Henrico) said.
On Jan. 30, the proposed legislation passed in the Senate with a vote of 22-18. It will now advance to the House of Delegates for a vote.
