Let’s Ban Scholastic Book Fairs Like me, many school librarians have had a love/hate relationship with Scholastic Books. Scholastic does publish some worthy titles, but you must cull through many low-quality books to find them. And their book fairs include a lot of non-book junk items. Even with these and other issues, Scholastic has monopolized the school book fair market for decades. Other large book companies have tried and failed to compete with them. There has been a steady drip of incidents where Scholastic has not been a good player. But the most recent was their egregious policy of separating their diverse books into a separate add-on collection. Ironically, the collection's name is “Share Every Story/Create Every Voice,” but if you wanted to “share every story,” you had to specifically request that the collection be included in your book fair. Although, at the time of the writing of this article, Scholastic has retracted this policy, they have been vague as to precisely what will be their policy going forward. There were 60 titles in their diverse collection, and even at first glance, it is blatantly apparent that most of the books on the list have characters of color, LBGTQ+ characters, or were written by a person of color. I decided to read a sampling of the picture books on the list since my expertise is i n that genre. Unsurprisingly, not only did I find nothing objectionable, but many of the books got star reviews from reputable review sources. However, I dug deeper and found that parent reviews on Amazon were rife with criticisms labeling books as pornography or grooming children to become LBGTQ+. To reflect the true absurdity of this list, I will give you one example. Federico and the Wolf is an adorable rhyming modernized retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. In this version, Federico brings ingredients to make Pico de Gallo with his grandfather. Cleverly, they get rid of the wolf by feeding him the hottest pepper from their recipe. The book is sprinkled with a smattering of Spanish words and includes a recipe for Pico de Gallo. The only objection I found to it was on Amazon from a parent from Mexico who thought the wolf illustrations were a bit too scary for her young child. So seriously, can we not even expose children to other cultures at all? THE BAREFOOT LIBRARIAN
Librarians, check out other options - Barefoot Books book fairs or ask your local independent bookstores. (Indie bookstores seize this golden opportunity!)
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