GREENVILLE — South Carolina librarians and a group of high-school students have filed a lawsuit against the state’s top education official and the state’s largest school district in response to a growing list of books banned from public schools.
The federal lawsuit — not yet available through a public database but provided to The Post and Courier by the American Civil Liberties Union — claims that a state book regulation launched in July 2024 violates the First and 14th Amendments.
The lawsuit contends that the regulation’s overly broad language — which includes the possibility of a state board hearing for violators — has placed a chilling effect on librarians whose job it is to curate their schools’ collections. At the same time, the vague verbiage has led to vastly different responses from among the state’s dozens of school districts and inconsistent application to books banned or not banned at the state level, the lawsuit alleges.
“SCASL has a lot of librarians who are very afraid because of this regulation,” ACLU attorney Sam Kennedy said. “So a lot of (the lawsuit) started with them and their concerns about potential repercussions if they fail to abide by the regulation.”
Superintendent Ellen Weaver could not be reached for comment, but a spokesperson for the S.C. Department of Education said the agency would “vigorously defend these commonsense policies.” The policies, he continued, set “clear and legally sound standards” for the state’s schools.
A spokesperson for Greenville County Schools declined to comment, saying the district has not yet been served the lawsuit.
The core of the state regulation is that materials containing “sexual content” must be removed from public schools; however, librarians and literature experts at local and state hearings over the past year have argued that language is being cherry-picked from books without considering the merit of works as a whole.
Additionally, the regulation sets aside the discretion of librarians in local schools — all of whom hold master’s degrees — to curate books for their students.
“This regulation is a solution in search of a problem,” Kennedy said. “South Carolina law already makes it illegal to distribute obscene materials to minors, and no librarian worth their salt would put something that was obscene on the shelves.”
Under the regulation, 21 books have been removed from all public schools in the state and one requires students to have written permission from their parents to read.
Chaos and confusion among districts
The vague language in the state regulation has sown chaos and confusion among school districts, said Paul Bowers, a spokesperson for the ACLU.
Some districts have preemptively removed more books. In Greenville County, for example, 46 books have been removed from shelves. In an interview last fall, a district official explained the extra books were removed in anticipation of possible complaints. No public hearings have taken place.
Greenville Schools also canceled book fairs last fall over concerns that officials could not certify every book coming into schools would be acceptable under the state regulation. By the following spring, the district allowed the fairs again.
Other districts have focused on electronic tools, which are included under the regulation’s broad applicability to all “instructional materials.” The Berkeley County School District blocked access to DISCUS — a free research tool provided by the South Carolina State Library — back in February without prior notice to teachers or librarians. The online tool has since been partially restored, but the district’s elementary and middle schools no longer have access.
DISCUS is vetted and paid for by the South Carolina State Library and offers resources such as encyclopedias, e-books, newspapers and test preparation materials.
The ACLU acquired documents through public records requests that showed officials in Dorchester 2, Charleston County, and Beaufort County Schools reached out to the State Library asking if DISCUS was compliant with the state regulation after learning that Berkeley restricted access to the platform.
More recently, Fort Mill schools and Charleston County schools have removed or restricted student access to county libraries’ digital collections via SORA, a digital reading application for students to access ebooks and audiobooks from their school and public libraries.
First and 14th Amendments
The lawsuit picks apart the regulation itself, including how materials are banned, how “sexual conduct” is defined, how the regulation is enforced, how compliance is monitored through collection catalogs, how districts differ in their application of it, and how the state board itself has been inconsistent from book to book. It also picks apart February and March 2025 follow-up memos from Weaver’s office.
Because it is overly broad and content-based, the regulation violates the First Amendment under the Supreme Court’s standard for obscenity, the lawsuit said.
The text of the regulation also violates the 14th Amendment, the lawsuit said, because its language “fails to provide librarians and other educators with sufficient certainty about what materials do and do not amount to a ‘description or depiction’ of ‘sexual conduct.’”
According to a February memo meant to clarify the regulation, descriptions of sexual conduct might include language with enough “explanatory detail” to form “a mental image of the conduct occurring.”
“I don’t know about you, but that sounds really subjective, and I … don’t think our librarians know how to apply that,” Kennedy said.
The superintendent’s March memo, which echoed Trump administration anti-diversity policies, meanwhile, called for the suppression of ideas to “positively indoctrinate students with the political administration’s views on sex, gender, race, and American exceptionalism.”
This, too, is a violation of Constitutional rights, the lawsuit contends.
Student complaints
A student from a public school in Charleston County, as well as two siblings who attend Greenville High School, are listed as plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
The Charleston student — who attends Academic Magnet High School — is a member of the Diversity Awareness Youth Literacy Organization.
According to the lawsuit, before passage of the regulation, he was able to borrow books from his teacher’s classroom collection. That ended when the regulation required all educators — teachers and librarians — to catalog all their books. Many teachers stopped providing classroom libraries altogether, the lawsuit said.
Two students at Greenville High also were members of DAYLO, according to the lawsuit, and wanted to read “Perks of Being a Wallflower” — a book banned by the state school board. They said they would bring their own copies to school but were blocked from doing so, according to the lawsuit.
“By mandating the removal of all materials that describe sexual conduct from the classroom and the library, the Regulation undermines the Plaintiffs education,” the lawsuit concludes.
Education Lab reporter Valerie Nava contributed to this story.