Parents and officials in the North Little Rock School District are at odds over a controversial plan to shield certain books from students.
In October, district leaders told schools to pull more than 50 books from the district’s reading app, called Epic. Most of the books on the list center on queer experiences or civil rights activism.
Epic is an online library for kids. It offers thousands of books, audiobooks, and short learning videos. Epic tracks their progress and lets them move at their own pace.
The district says they removed the books to “respect family beliefs.” But some parents are skeptical.
Stacey Lemonn has two children in the district. She says school officials didn’t directly notify her family about the removals.
“I found it on Facebook. One of my fellow mom friends from the school posted the internal memo that went out to the teachers," she said. "I was surprised. I did not expect our district to ever ban books.”
Lemonn and others say the issue raises questions about viewpoint discrimination, where people or materials are censored because of their perspective or ideology.
Jay Bequette, an attorney for the North Little Rock School District, said he doesn’t think removing the books amounts to viewpoint discrimination. He maintained that the district acted lawfully.
Little Rock Public Radio requested an interview with the district. In a statement, a spokesperson said the district values respect and belonging, but that their actions were based on “the need to adhere to state law.”
The statement referenced two state laws: one, part of the Arkansas LEARNS Act, bans instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity before the fifth grade. The second deals specifically with libraries, and opens up librarians to civil penalties for providing material that’s “harmful to minors.”
But, a federal judge blocked the library law in 2023, saying lawmakers wrote it too broadly and failed to define what qualifies as “harmful to minors."
Little Rock Public Radio obtained internal emails detailing how the removals unfolded, including a memo showing multiple school staffers were involved in removing the titles.
Assistant Superintendent Jacob Smith initiated the process after a principal sent him the list of books.
Carmen Langston, the district’s literacy and reading coordinator, confirmed the books came from the Epic platform and provided instructions for hiding them. Attorney Jay Bequette advised administrators to block access, writing the books “have no place in a public school.”
A formal memo was sent to all elementary principals and teachers on October 21.
Bequette told Little Rock Public Radio his role was to advise the district on the legal framework, not to make final decisions about the books. He said he hadn’t reviewed the titles he advised the school district to remove.
“Well, I mean, I haven’t seen the books. Just based on the titles, they did not appear to me as a lay person that they needed to be in a K-5 media center,” he said.
Bequette says his guidance was based on state law, specifically the sections a court struck down.
“Section four of Act 372 applies to school districts, and section four was not at issue in the litigation you’re referencing. Section four… talks about, you know, media centers having written policies to establish guidelines for the selection, relocation and retention of materials.”
The district last revised its policy on selecting library materials in 2010. Licensed media specialists choose what goes in the library. If a title is formally challenged, the school convenes a committee, including the principal and a media specialist, to review it in full. The policy requires schools to keep books available during the review, and prohibits removing material because of its viewpoint.
The school board steps in only if a formal challenge is appealed. The policy also requires schools to offer a broad range of age-appropriate materials that support the curriculum, reflect varied viewpoints, and build critical-thinking skills.
Little Rock Public Radio filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documentation showing the district followed this process. The district said no one filed an official challenge against the books.
There’s also a legal gray area about whether the law putting limits on content taught before the fifth grade applies to the Epic platform at all. Epic is a private, stand-alone reading platform that students use during their designated “free time.” Under the LEARNS Act and the state’s rules, only materials used in curriculum or adopted for instruction can be challenged. It remains unclear whether the district had legal authority to remove titles under LEARNS.
But in practice, no policy guided how students used Epic, yet the district removed the books under the LEARNS Act.
“Well, that’s an educated decision. I’m just addressing, you know, the legal issues, but those are your educated decisions made by educators. As a lawyer, I defer to the educators' decisions, because they’re educators and I’m not,” Bequette said.
Book challenges are rising across the country. PEN America, a nonprofit organization, reports more than six-thousand book bans during the last school year across 23 states and 87 school districts.
Rebecka Virden sees a pattern. She is a Van Buren mother who won a book-removal case in federal court. She holds a library science degree, and now runs a nonprofit supporting libraries. She worries about the broader message these restrictions send.
“They are all respecting only one family type of family values, or one set of family values, at the expense of others," she said. "And that is just fundamentally not how libraries ought to operate, because when they remove them, it is placing a stigma on those books.”
Stacey Lemonn and her husband, John, read through the books on the list. Stacey said the books did not match the rationale the district cited.
“These books are not sexual content. These books are about empathy or about community. We have to be accepting of each other," she said.
She also pushes back on the district’s claim that the removals protect “family values.”
“I think that’s a very opinionated thing to say. My family values are not the superintendent’s family values, apparently. As far as I understand it, the teachers do not push books on the kids. The kids just get to choose.”
John says the issue isn’t just the removals themselves, but the laws behind them.
"That’s why these laws are ruled as unconstitutional. They’re overly broad. But they don’t define what is harmful. They don’t define what is inappropriate.”
At a North Little Rock School Board meeting in October, community members urged the district to reconsider the removals, saying the district is opening itself up to potential lawsuits.
A group called Public School Strong Arkansas started a petition to urge the district to reinstate the titles. They gathered nearly 200 signatures by early December and said they plan to return to each school board meeting until the district restores access to the books.
John Lemonn is asking the school district to update the challenge process. He says he wants the district to run the books through the new policy once it’s in place. He’s ready to sue if he has to, but says that would waste resources for everyone. His goal is to make the issue public enough that the district follows the process without a court battle.
He says the larger problem is the refusal to treat LGBTQIA+ people with dignity.
"But when it comes to something like this, homophobia, there is no civil discourse. I do not accept any kind of a discussion around whether or not we should respect the humanity of our gay brothers and sisters.”