The Next Parental Rights Fight Is In The School Library

Last year, the Supreme Court reminded public schools of a truth too often forgotten: parents do not surrender their religious convictions at the schoolhouse door.

In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court held that Montgomery County, Maryland, could not force parents to choose between their faith and participation in public education. The county introduced LGBTQ-inclusive storybooks for elementary students, initially offered notice and opt-outs, then rescinded those accommodations. The Court was right to say no.

Public education is a government benefit. It may not be conditioned on a parent’s willingness to expose a child to instruction that poses a real threat of undermining the religious beliefs that parents try hard to instill in their children.

But Mahmoud did not end the debate. It merely answered the first question: whether schools may compel exposure to certain materials over religious objections and without an opt-out. The next question is already here: who decides what materials belong in public schools in the first place — parents and locally elected school boards, or institutions operating largely outside meaningful parental oversight?

That question is now being litigated in Colorado. In Crookshanks v. Elizabeth School District, pending in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, plaintiffs challenge the Elizabeth School District’s decision to remove a small number of titles from its school libraries.

The district’s combined library collection includes more than 50,000 books. The challenged removals involved only a fraction of that collection — books the district says contained sexually explicit or age-inappropriate material, or material directly at odds with what many parents teach their children at home.

The constitutional issue is not whether every parent will agree about every book. They will not. Nor is it whether older students may encounter hard subjects in appropriate settings. Of course they will.

The issue is whether public institutions entrusted with children may disregard parents altogether when their decisions shape a child’s moral, religious, and civic formation.

The Supreme Court has long recognized that parents have a constitutionally protected role in directing the upbringing and education of their children. For example, in Meyer v. Nebraska, the Court protected parents’ ability to choose foreign-language instruction. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Court rejected Oregon’s attempt to force all children into public schools.

In Wisconsin v. Yoder, the Court protected Amish parents from compulsory public school attendance that conflicted with their faith. And in Mahmoud, the Court reaffirmed that schools may not refuse religious parents an accommodation from materials that burden free exercise.

Those cases stand for a basic proposition: government may not displace parents as the primary authority over their children’s moral and religious formation. That principle matters no less in a school library than in a classroom.

A parent should not discover after the fact that a school has exposed his or her child to material that directly conflicts with the family’s religious convictions. And elected school board members should not be treated as censors simply for responding to parents’ concerns about age-appropriate content.

Political rhetoric these days too often obscures legal analysis. Invoking the specter of censorship is powerful and effective rhetoric, but when used to describe a school board removing sexually explicit material from its library, it is wrong.

A public school’s library is not a public bookstore. A curriculum is not an unlimited marketplace of ideas. Public-school officials necessarily decide which books serve educational purposes, which materials are suitable for minors, and which content belongs in a government-run school setting.

Removing a book from a school library is not the same as prohibiting a private publisher from selling it, preventing a family from buying it, or criminalizing its possession. Constitutional law should not treat every school-board selection decision as if it were state censorship of private speech.

That does not mean school boards have unlimited authority. They do not. Government may not use schools to punish disfavored viewpoints or to burden religious exercise. But courts should be equally careful not to disable locally elected school boards from making good-faith judgments about what is appropriate for children in public schools.

Democratic accountability is not a constitutional defect. It is one of the safeguards.

On the facts as described by the Elizabeth School District, the board used an accountable, responsible, and defensible process. It reviewed specific books, listened to parents and community members, considered student age and suitability, and de-selected only a handful of titles from a very large collection.

That’s not censorship. It’s democratic governance of public school materials for minors.

Make no mistake about it: the stakes are larger than one Colorado district or one set of books.

The country is, once again, confronting a fundamental question of constitutional governance: who exercises public authority over children’s education, and through what accountable process?

Remember former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe? He learned the hard way and lost his bid for re-election against Glenn Youngkin when he said in a 2021 debate, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Parents across Virginia, including Democrats, disagreed.

The answer, obviously, is that parents must not remain silent while educational bureaucracies decide what children will read, see, and learn. Nor can it be that courts should reflexively condemn elected school boards whenever they respond to parents’ objections.

Public schools serve families of many faiths and convictions. There are more than 13,000 regular school districts across this country. That diversity requires humility from government, respect for parents, and room for local communities to make reasonable judgments. If courts treat every age-appropriate library decision as censorship, they risk weakening the very constitutional protections that allow families of different beliefs to trust public education.

Mahmoud was an important victory for parental rights and religious liberty. Crookshanks presents the next test. Parents have rights. Children deserve protection. And elected school boards must retain the authority — and the responsibility — to ensure that public schools respect both.

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Charles Stimson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Kristina Celeste is a Paralegal in Heritage’s Legal Action Center.