MONTGOMERY, Ala. — In a lengthy meeting on Thursday, the Alabama Public Library Service Board voted unanimously to delay a vote to disassociate from the American Library Association, a matter that has drawn controversy in recent months.
Proponents of Alabama cutting ties with the ALA say the association promotes explicit and gender identity reading material to children, while also criticizing ALA President Emily Drabinski for once proclaiming herself a Marxist. Supporters of the ALA instead say decisions on reading materials should be made on the local level within their communities and that the association provides valuable resources to Alabama libraries.
Some critics of the ALA, including Gov. Kay Ivey and several Republican lawmakers, have gone as far as to suggest that public libraries may lose state funding were the issue of controversial books not sorted out.
At Thursday’s meeting, some board members pushed back on those threats of funding cuts, as well as damage they say the dispute has caused.
“I think that all of this controversy, which has involved a handful of libraries in this state out of the 220, has damaged all libraries in terms of the funding we so desperately need,” said board chair Ronald Snider.
“I’ll remind everyone that this year, we were fortunate to get $1.41 (per capita) in state aid; that’s the highest amount that we’ve gotten since we got $1.25 almost 25 years ago.”
Snider went on to say that while larger libraries may not see much of an impact from state funding cuts, libraries serving smaller communities, with their comparatively small tax bases, could be hit much harder. Snider said that of the roughly 220 libraries in the state, 130 of them served communities of less than 10,000 people, and 77 of them served less than 5,000.
“In the 77 that are serving communities of 5,000, the average salary is $23,000, so these people – our librarians – are working very hard for very little money,” he continued. “What we need to be arguing for in the next legislative session is additional money for our libraries, because that’s what’s desperately needed.”
Other board members, such as Virginia Doyle, spoke directly to lawmakers who suggested cutting state funding to libraries, calling the notion “ridiculous” and “wrong.”
“I don’t know who got to the state legislators and the governor’s office and (had) them threaten to take our budget away from us, (but) it’s just wrong,” Doyle said.
House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter, R-Rainsville, in September urged the APLS Board to resolve the “ongoing controversies regarding inappropriate material being made available to children and young readers in public libraries across the state,” and warned if the issue was not resolved by the time lawmakers reconvene in February, that they could likely “help the APLS do its job” through legislative action.
Library Director Nancy Pack, whose resignation has been called for by Clean Up Alabama, the organization spearheading the effort to have Alabama cut ties with the ALA, said the controversy had not only hurt Alabama libraries, but had hurt librarians nationwide. The controversy, Pack continued, would even make recruiting staff for libraries more difficult.
“They have degraded the professional librarian; we are the ones that are trained to do library services, we are the ones who work hard in the field,” Pack said.
“My degree has been degraded down to nothing; they have no respect for the degree I’ve received, nor for any other public librarian in this state, and to me, that is awful.”
While the concerns expressed by board members over the controversy took up a significant portion of the meeting, members did ultimately decide to push the vote as to whether to dissociate from the ALA to sometime before March 31, 2024, when the state’s current membership expires.
On the decision to delay the vote, which was originally expected to happen Thursday, board member John Wahl, who’s been a strong proponent of dissociation, said he thought it was the right decision.
“I think it’s smart any time you’re dealing with a question dealing with a state agency to have all the information,” Wahl, who is also chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, said after the meeting. “I respect that my other board members were wanting to see how that process would look, and come back in January for a vote, which I’ll be very supportive of separation at that time.”