Albertans who responded to a recent government survey have landed heavily on letting locals select and manage school library materials.
Most residents of the province believe children should be protected from accessing graphic content in their school libraries, the results released Friday suggest. But support was under 50 per cent in each of six groupings for having the government develop provincewide requirements.
Educational frontliners like teachers, librarians, parents and school administrators received the most support for deciding what content in schools is appropriate for students.
Explicit depictions of sexual and other acts in four graphic novels or graphic memoirs prompted the province to announce that it’s investigating the idea of setting standards. The books, found in school libraries in Calgary and Edmonton, were open to children in kindergarten and up.
Most survey respondents — 67 per cent — were from the Edmonton or Calgary areas. The two major metropolitan areas represent a similar proportion of Alberta’s total population.
Respondents in the survey, which closed June 6, were asked whether parental consent should be required for children to access sexually explicit content. The survey found a split of 52 per cent who disagreed or strongly disagreed with requiring consent and 44 per cent who agreed or strongly agreed.
Strong support, at 62 per cent of responses, emerged for parents and guardians having a role in reporting or challenging sexually explicit content in school libraries.
School and public librarians who responded were 74 per cent not at all or not very supportive of government requirements, making up the group most strongly against the idea. The percentage drops to 68 per cent for teachers and 55 per cent for school administrators. The more general grouping called “interested Albertan” comes in at 62 per cent unsupportive.
K-12 parents were closely split, though, with 49 per cent ticking boxes for unsupportive and 44 per cent for supportive. Parents without children in school were 55 per cent unsupportive and 39 per cent supportive.
More than 77,000 respondents took part in the online survey, with 42 per cent of K-12 parent participants saying explicit materials should not be accessible at any age for students in kindergarten to Grade 12.
The survey conducted by Alberta Education and Childcare follows a separate public opinion poll of 1,500 adult Albertans last month. It found that 94 per cent of respondents were against sexually explicit materials being allowed in elementary school libraries. And 51 per cent were against them in any library accessible to children.
Also in the earlier poll, 75 per cent of respondents said it’s important for parents to have a say about what materials are present in school libraries.
Only 14 per cent of K-12 parent respondents said sexually explicit content is acceptable for all age groups in public schools. Those in the group who supported high school-aged students having access amounted to 22 per cent, while the percentage drops to 18 per cent for middle school and four per cent for elementary school.
When it comes to deciding what materials are age-appropriate, school librarians at 23 per cent got the biggest vote of confidence. They were followed by teachers at 20 per cent, parents at 19 per cent, school boards and school administrators at 13 per cent each, and students themselves at eight per cent.
The category of other — which presumably includes the provincial government — notched just four per cent.
The province looks at the survey as guidance only and part of an overall public engagement on the issue.
It appears the Ministry of Education and Childcare is going ahead with developing standards, even though the survey fails to give it a ringing endorsement.
The government will use the results and “ongoing feedback collected from education partners” to develop provincewide standards, the news release posted Friday says. “These standards will provide school boards with clear and consistent guidelines for selecting and managing age-appropriate materials in school libraries across the province.”
A downloadable document summarizing results says: “It should be noted that this online survey was designed for public engagement. While the results provide useful insights, they should not be generalized to the broader population.”
Many school boards already have policies around content. Potential new requirements would be consistent across the province and would apply to public, separate, francophone, public charter and independent schools.
To download and read the summary, go to open.alberta.ca/opendata and scroll down to the item titled School library survey data.
NOISY DATA
Bad actors and their bots forced the Alberta government to weed through noisy data in the survey, Education and Childcare Minister Demetrios Nicolaides told a roundtable of rural media representatives earlier last week.
Nicolaides said the survey generated “a high volume of responses.”
But apparently the results included “attempts to undermine the validity of the questionnaire through the submission of hundreds of responses at the same time, probably administered through bots or other types of measures. So that's a little disappointing,” he said.
At the time of the roundtable with rural media June 17, the government was busy sifting through the data to summarize and release findings.
Out of an original 196,901 entries, 118,574 duplicates and 932 blank entries were removed, today’s release says. That means the results are based on 77,395 responses. Another 515 responses were received in a French language survey.
