With the Tinker, 1969, and Goss, 1975, decisions, the Supreme Court put students' claims to certain constitutional rights on a strong legal foundation. In the Tinker decision, the Court upheld the rights of students to "peaceful expression of political opinion." Black armbands, worn by students as a sign of protest against the Vietnam War, were found to be forms of political speech protected by the 1st Amendment. The traditional relationship between student and school, governed by the concept of in loco parentis—the school assumes the role of the parent while the child is in its care—came under fire from students who sought to bring democracy into the schoolhouse. That concept was again under fire in this case.
Deciding what literature students would be able to obtain from their school library, and what input students would have in the decision, was one of the areas in which the in loco parentis authority of the school was challenged. Resolving conflicts over the censorship of material judged to be obscene by some and artistic by others was hardly a new area of inquiry for the Court. In Roth, 1957, Ginzburg, 1966, and Miller, 1973, the authority of state and federal government to practice censorship was clarified.
Several school board members of the Island Trees School District, Long Island, New York, attended a conference sponsored by Parents of New York United, an organization of parents concerned about the general "permissiveness" of the New York public schools. At the conference the board members obtained lists of books described as "objectionable for youth." Upon their return home, they found nine books from the lists in their junior and senior high school libraries. The books included: Slaughterhouse Five, The Naked Ape, Down These Mean Streets, Laughing Boy, Soul on Ice, Best Short Stories of Negro Writers (edited by Langston Hughes), and Black Boy. Calling these books "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy," the members moved that they be pulled from the library shelves. In February 1976, they were removed.
A group of the high school's students sued the school board to have the books returned, saying that the books were removed because "passages in the books offended their social, political, and moral tastes and not because the books, taken as a whole, were lacking in educational value." In short, the students claimed that their 1st Amendment rights had been denied. The Supreme Court of New York agreed with the students. The School District then appealed that decision to the Supreme Court.
The case involved the censorship power of the school board and whether that power violated the rights of the students as guaranteed by the 1st Amendment. Do school boards have the authority to censor school libraries? Would censorship of school libraries violate the 1st Amendment rights of students? Is the censorship of libraries different from the censorship, or "deselection," of curriculum materials? Does the fact that library use is "voluntary" give school libraries more freedom from "censorship" than curriculum materials, whose use by the students is not voluntary?
For Island Trees School District: Duly elected and empowered by State law, the local school board is vested with the authority to regulate and operate the schools. No one thinks that public school libraries are operated free from any regulation. Librarians are employees; thus they will follow school board instructions. The fact that a book is in print does not by itself make it worthy of inclusion in a high school library. No reasonable parent wants obscenity in a school library. Some standard must be set, and the school board must set the standard. Students do not have a "right to read" anything. Offensive literature may be removed at the discretion of publicly elected officials.
For Pico and other students: The arbitrary actions of the school board in removing books from the school library reminded the students of the fictional situation in the book Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. In that book "firemen" looked for "illegal literature" and burned the "illegal" books. Students in high school need wide access to literature from a variety of perspectives. A library book, moreover, unlike a book assigned in a course, is not compulsory reading. If students find the content offensive or disturbing, they may choose to stop reading it at any point. The development of a cultivated mind requires encounters with divergent and sometimes even offensive views. What sort of citizen is produced when the whim of a school board member can proscribe books that have an important, but controversial, message?
The Court made a narrow decision in Island Trees. "Local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek, by their removal, to prescribe what shall be orthodox in matters of opinion." While affirming that school boards do have comprehensive power to manage local schools, the Court asserted that "their discretion must be exercised in a manner which comports with the First Amendment rights of students. The special characteristics of school libraries make that environment especially appropriate for recognition of those (First Amendment) rights."
The decision made clear that students had a "right to read" whatever might be placed in a school library. The decision in this case should be seen as having a narrow scope. The Court ruled only that the "deselection" of the books violated student rights. Furthermore, the Court did not deal with the selection or deselection of "curriculum materials," thereby avoiding the more difficult question of who judges what materials to be "appropriate" for public school use.