Alberta’s education minister is set to announce on Thursday a new series of standards to regulate school library materials that will ban what it characterizes as “explicit sexual content.” Read More
”These new standards are to ensure that school boards have clear guidance to ensure age-appropriate access to school library materials, while reflecting the values and priorities of Albertans,” said Education and Childcare Demetrios Nicolaides
“These new standards are to ensure that school boards have clear guidance to ensure age-appropriate access to school library materials, while reflecting the values and priorities of Albertans,” said Education and Childcare Demetrios Nicolaides
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Alberta’s education minister is set to announce on Thursday a new series of standards to regulate school library materials that will ban what it characterizes as “explicit sexual content.”
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Education and Childcare Minister Demetrios Nicolaides is set to make the announcement at a news conference later this afternoon.
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Nicolaides has previously stressed the need for a consistent standard for selecting age-appropriate library materials across all school boards.
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“These new standards are to ensure that school boards have clear guidance to ensure age-appropriate access to school library materials, while reflecting the values and priorities of Albertans,” he said in a news release ahead of Thursday’s announcement.
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The changes come via a ministerial order that was signed by Nicolaides on July 4. It defines explicit sexual content as that “containing a detailed and clear depiction of a sexual act.”
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Library materials deemed to be containing explicit sexual content will be banned while sexual content considered to be non-explicit as well as age-appropriate will be accessible to high school students.
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The order puts the onus on school boards to remove any materials with explicit sexual content from their libraries by Oct. 1 of this year and also develop publicly available policies in alignment with the new standards by January 2026.
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The order outlines a number of requirements for such policies, which must be communicated to staff, students, and parents ahead of their implementation at the start of next year:
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- Outline how school library materials are selected
- How staff supervise students’ access to such materials
- How a student, parent, school board employee, or “other member of the school community” can request a review or removal of materials
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The new standards will apply to public, separate, francophone, charter, and independent schools, but not to municipal libraries located within schools or to materials chosen by teachers as learning resources.
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“Our primary concern from the very beginning has been around material that’s really graphic and around sexual content, and making sure that it’s age appropriate,” Nicolaides told Postmedia in an interview last month.