The Alberta government is moving forward with a province-wide initiative to ban pornographic and sexually explicit material from school libraries.Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides announced Monday the UCP government has opened a new public consultation to create consistent standards for evaluating the age-appropriateness of books available in K-12 school libraries across Alberta.The announcement follows the discovery of several graphic novels containing explicit sexual content in school libraries in both Calgary and Edmonton. The government released a list of several books currently found to be available to children as young as kindergarten in school libraries. They contain graphic images of sexual acts, including homosexual, transsexual, pedophilic and incestuous content, and prose equally as explicit. The books further include suicide ideation. “As a parent, it is extremely concerning to find out that books explicitly depicting sexual acts are available to students in some school libraries,” said Nicolaides in a statement. “We are going to do something about this serious issue, by consulting Albertans and creating standards to ensure students do not have access to age-inappropriate materials in school libraries.”.The province currently offers voluntary guidelines for teaching and learning resources but lacks consistent provincewide standards for selecting school library books. Nicolaides said the absence of a unified approach has led to discrepancies between school boards, raising concerns about safeguarding students.The new standards will be mandatory for all public, Catholic, francophone, charter and independent schools. School boards will also be required to implement public policies on library book selection by the start of the 2025–26 school year.However, the changes will not affect public libraries — including the 55 municipal libraries that operate within school buildings.Albertans can share their views through an online survey. The link is available here. The Alberta government provided a PDF with more information, which can be found below. The file contains explicit images — reader be warned..The government has not yet confirmed how many copies of these titles are in circulation or whether any removals have occurred to date.
